Fake it till You Make it – Festive Dining for the Undomestic Goddess

Hi, my name is Delphine and I have a confession: I am completely and utterly hopeless in the kitchen. I can’t cook to save my life and the thought of having friends over and having to feed them sends chills down my spine (and not the good sort of chills) and usually makes me reach desperately for the phone to call in a pizza.

It gets a wee bit embarassing during the festive season when friends talk about meeting up and I demur from offering my place as the venue for our gatherings. So I decided that it’s high time I do something about how pathetically un-domestic I am. Obviously we’re not about to have a holiday miracle where I turn into Martha Stewart overnight, so the only way to go about this is to fake it till I make it in 4 easy steps.

1. COVER UP
   Get a pretty tablecloth and some matching napkins. This instantly makes everything look a lot more fancy and like you have put in a lot of effort. I love the ones from the VINTER 2016 range with a subtle pattern. My daughter was taken aback by how nice the table looked and demanded to know if it was Thanksgiving. LOL.
2. STACK UP
   If you’re not great with colour coordination, always stick to classy neutrals like black, white, and grey. Honestly, you can never go wrong with white plates. We used white FÄRGRIK plates and side plates and grey ARV bowls on black place mats and everything went so well with the tablecloth and napkins. For serving the food, we used a VARDAGEN pie dish and oven dish.
3. LIGHT UP
   To make the table look more festive, try some tealights in different sizes (but battery-operated ones if you have small children in the house). Don’t forget to pick up some batteries for the lights! Since my un-domestic nature extends to an inability to put together some flowers for a decent centrepiece, we used a festive garland, some twine, and red wicker balls (can reuse for CNY, yay…)
4. SERVE UP
   You are probably wondering, ‘What about the food? Are you going to serve pizza when you have such a fancy set-up?’ Of course not! The final and most important step to faking it is to make a stop at the IKEA Swedish Food Market! We transformed frozen meatballs, multigrain bread mix, frozen marinated salmon, and frozen ready-to-bake cinnamon rolls into an EPIC meal. I also harassed my longsuffering sister to bake some cupcakes for the kids and they looked so yummy on the GARNERA serving stand!

tones of grey and white

essential meatballs that everybody loves

multigrain bread and gravad lax

festive cupcakes by my sister

tealights

time to eat

Disclaimer: This is part of a series of posts from our collaboration with IKEA Singapore. All IKEA products seen in this post are sponsored by IKEA. All ideas are mine (and my longsuffering sister’s).