Setting the perfect home dessert table

Home dessert tables are a delightful way to highlight the pièce de résistance at your party: the dessert!

Whether you’re planning a home dessert table for your friend’s bridal shower, your child’s birthday party, or just a fun get-together with family, follow these tips to make it beautiful.

Chocolate truffles slacked on a centerpiece that showcases them at different heights.

5 tips to set the perfect home dessert table

1. Choose a theme.

A home dessert table without a cohesive theme is just a bunch of desserts on a table. Decide on a theme to tie all your desserts together.

  • It could be a color: people can bring cookies, cakes, or homemade lollipops. Anything goes, as long as they’re all red!
  • Alternately, you could choose a type of dessert, such as chocolates, cakes, or pies.
  • Finally, you could choose a seasonal theme related to the occasion, such as winter favorites, best desserts to eat on the go, or the funkiest kid desserts ever.

2. Create height.

Desserts are pretty flat. It’s just the nature of most food – it’s pretty flat. If you’re working with cakes, you might be lucky to get a few inches, but otherwise, you’ll have to get creative to make your dessert table visually appealing.

Add levels to your dessert table to excite everyone’s eyes along with their taste buds. Hang a banner or streamers on the wall behind the table. Use cake stands and decorative boxes to display some desserts higher than the ones on serving platters.

3. Decorate.

Decor goes beyond the food itself. Drape a printed fabric over your boring kitchen table. Place decorative candles and mini flower bouquets in appealing arrangements. Add to the theme with cute ornaments or picture frames of your guests of honor. Top it all off by sprinkling in some confetti (bonus points if it’s edible).

Don’t forget the most critical piece of decor – your dessert name cards! Get a cute set of blank name cards, a few colorful markers, and write out the names of your desserts in a pretty script.

4. Figure out your servings.

Organize your dessert menu depending on how many guests you’ll have. If you’re serving smaller desserts like cookies or cupcakes, a good rule of thumb is to assume 3 or 4 servings per guest.

Then you need to account for people’s varying dietary needs and preferences. To make sure everyone have enough options, add three to your serving number. So, if you’re assuming 3 mini-desserts per guest, you’ll want to have 6 different dessert options for them to choose from.

Variety is part of the joy of a dessert table, but it can quickly fall into overwhelm – for both the host and your guests. Follow the tips above, and you’ll deliver a dessert table that’s just the right amount of sweet.

5. Let Delysia Chocolatier help.

Will you be featuring chocolate in your dessert table? Many of our chocolate treats here at Delysia can fill out your dessert table, whether you use them as decor or as the main event!

Scatter pieces of chocolate bark throughout the table, display a collection of our chocolate truffles, or wow guests with our molded chocolate sculptures. The choices are endless.

Nicole Patel

Nicole Patel is the proprietor of and chocolatier for Delysia Chocolatier. In 2006 while pregnant with her first son, Nicole made a batch of chocolate truffles as holiday gifts. To the delight of friends and family, she continued to create chocolates as a way to relieve stress from her corporate engineering job. In 2008, a chance trip to Becker Vineyards led to Nicole being the first in Texas to make truffles using local wines. Within five years, what started as a hobby turned Delysia into one of the Top Ten Chocolatiers in the Americas, as selected by the International Chocolate Salon.