How to throw a Star Trek Party

Although it has been almost 3 years since we threw our Star Trek Party, I recently discovered that the web site we set up for the party is still getting traffic, as are the labels we created for the drinks. So, we thought it would be good to get a bit more mileage out of all of that preparation and write a guide on how to throw a Star Trek party of your very own, especially with regard to the food and drink. We found a few "how to" guides online but they either recommended buying a ton of custom crap (costumes etc.) or were not even trying (cookies in the shapes of moons and stars?). Obviously while we have a lot of ideas here you should pick and choose and make the party your own. You can also see all of our pics from the party.

The basic elements we wanted to go for were:

• Foods from Star Trek
• Drinks from Star Trek
• Star Trek decorations and door prizes
• Star Trek related entertainment (watching it, playing games, etc.)
• A sweet Star Trek website for the party with directions and info about the food / drink / entertainment so people could get excited beforehand.

The food was harder than expected; there's a star trek cookbook you can buy, but it's total BS. They're not even trying. Plus virtually nothing from there is vegan. We knew we wanted to do a "cellular peptide cake with mint frosting" (just a yellow cake with mint frosting, some decorations, and a recording of Troi screaming "no Data!" to play while cutting the cake with a serrated knife):

We also found a recipe online for vegan hasperat (a spicy, briny, Bajoran wrap; this recipe is hummus w/ horseradish and sriracha, plus cucumbers and carrots soaked in vinegar and soy sauce, plus baby spinach leaves) and definitely wanted to do "yamok sauce" (having just watched a DS9 episode all about it), and figured cotton candy could work as truffled baby tribbles:

We also found a great idea for "gagh" (a Klingon dish of live worms) online (cooking spaghetti in red wine instead of water to make it look like worms), and even put some of our compost worms in a little dish for the people who planned to complain about the gagh being dead, and I figured gimme lean cooked with some smoke flavor, maple syrup, and assorted spices could stand in for targ (Klingon pig).

The last two foods (not pictured) were just cool things we found at the farmer's market that we assigned star trek names to (we used things that were referred to but never actually shown so they could be believable): pineapple tomatillos (aka ground cherries) become "takka berries" and an orange watermelon became "Alvinian melon."

The most fun was definitely coming up with the label designs for the drinks, and my absolute favorite was the design for "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot" (each of these 6 panels made up one side of the tea box, with the directions on the bottom):

You can see / download all of the labels for the drinks, but in addition to tea and earl grey infused vodka, we did prune juice (courtesy of Worf), Slug-O-Cola (from a DS9 episode, we used green apple soda and wheatgrass juice, strained through cut okra to make it just a bit mucilaginous), bloodwine (just red wine, we rejected the idea of dissolving an iron pill in them as over the top), chech'tluth (from a TNG episode, we used mostly 150 proof rum, plus scotch, some gin, and lots of bitters), Romulan Ale (blue food coloring in vodka and white cranberry juice), raktajino (weird coffee substitute with dry ice in it, I think we used "Teecino"), etc. The key is putting dry ice in everything, just for fun. To make the labels I had to download klingon, ferengi, and romulan fonts, but it was worth it the results (note that we printed out "menus" to explain what all of the food and drink was supposed to be, and what it was actually made from):

We ordered a lot of star trek figurines for door prizes, got some wall stick-ons, and printed this for our coffee table (which we have retained):

Once everyone had food and beverages, we quickly determined that we weren't hardcore enough to be able to play "star trek scene it" and just picked episodes to watch (with a borrowed projector and screen) by consensus:

We still have all of our templates, so if you want to start with any of our labels and tweak the text on your own, or just have a higher quality version to print from, send us an email!