Sweet Piper Jane asked for an Ice Cream Party as her ‘all-the-way-potty-trained’ prize (a girl after her mama’s own heart, both in her love of ice cream) and I had to share the can’t-live-without discovery we made in our ice cream party preparations.

Three words- Pre-scooped. Ice. Cream.

Friends, I’ll be honest- it’s a game changer for summer parties.

And since the rainbow of flavors is perfect for Color Your Summer (and specifically a rainbow hued project), I thought I’d share a little how to as part of this colorful, summer-y series.

To pre-scoop ice cream for your next party-

First gather a pile of muffin tins (we had eleven ice cream flavors and pre-scooped about six scoops per flavor). Working quickly, and making nice, round scoops, fill all of the muffin holes in your muffin tin with scoops of ice cream. Be sure not to let the ice cream melt into the bottom of the tin (this makes your scoops hard to remove and kind of wonky). Freeze for several hours. We froze most of the scoops overnight, but did scoop several of the flavors the morning of the party (the party started at 7:00 pm, so they had about ten hours to freeze up).

When it’s party time, take the lids off your ice cream buckets and pile the pre-scooped ice cream inside. Since we left about half of each pint unscooped, the scoops had a nice little bed of ice cream to rest on, and still made fabulous domes of scoops for each flavor.

Once your scoops are in place (or even beforehand), set rows of dry ice along the bottom of a large galvanized bucket and cover with a dish towel. Set the buckets of ice cream on top of the dish towel and let your guests go to town!

Ice cream at summer parties just got much more manageable (and doesn’t the rainbow of scoops look so pretty as well?)!

ps- This idea is not new, nor mine, just so fabulous that I need to pass it on (I think I saw it in Real Simple or Martha’s Stewart long ago and have been wanting to try it out ever since)!