Earth Day Cookies

Ingredients: 

1 cup butter

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

2 3/4 cups flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

blue and green food gel

Cream the butter and sugar together. Add the egg and vanilla. 

Mix the dry ingredients in a small bowl. Gradually add to the wet ingredients. Divide the dough in two. Add blue food coloring to one and green to the other. 

Pull little pieces off of each half until you have about 1tbsp of dough. Roll the pieces together and place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. 

Bake at 375 for about 8 minutes. Let them sit for a minute or so on the baking sheet and then remove to a cooling rack. 

Another activity we did for Earth Day this year was to make dirt cups and plant some flowers in them. I got a bundle of flowers from the Dollar Tree and some green straws. We cut off a flower and placed in in the straw and then planted them in the dirt cups.

Banana Cake

Ingredients: 

1 1/2 cups milk and 1 1/2 Tbsp vinegar

About 1 1/3 cups mashed bananas (3-4 bananas)

2/3 cup butter

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1 cup sugar

3 eggs

 1 tsp vanilla

3 cups flour

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

Add the vinegar to the milk and let it sit while combining the other ingredients. 

Using a hand mixer, cream the butter, brown sugar, and sugar. Add the eggs, banana, and vanilla. Then alternate adding about 1/3 of the flour and 1/3 of the milk. Repeat alternating and mixing until the flour and milk is all mixed. 

Pour in a greased 9x13 inch pan and bake at 350 degrees for about 50 minutes. It may take longer...but make sure you start checking it at 50 minutes. 

You could top this with a variety of frosting, but I chose to use my cooked frosting recipe. 

Ingredients: 

1 cup milk

4 Tbsp flour

1 cup butter, softened

1 cup sugar

1 tsp vanilla

Start by whisking the milk and flour in a small saucepan. Let the mixture boil. (It becomes very thick.) Place that in the refrigerator to cool. Then beat the butter and sugar with a stand mixer. Add the vanilla.  Add the cooled milk/flour mixture. Whip on the highest setting you have until it is light and fluffy. Spread on the cooled cake. 

Easter Charcuterie Boards

The bunnies are homemade marshmallows that I cut using a bunny cookie cutter. 

I also dipped some of them in chocolate. 

 

Peanut Butter Eggs

 

Ingredients: 

 3 cups powdered sugar

1 1/2 cups creamy peanut butter

1/4 cup melted butter

2 Tbsp milk

2 bags melting chocolate disks

Put the powdered sugar, peanut butter, and butter in a bowl. Use a hand mixer and mix until crumbly. Add the milk and mix again. (It will still be a little crumbly.) 

Roll the dough out on the table until it is about 1/2 inch thick. 

I cut some bigger eggs with my egg cookie cutter. For the smaller eggs pictured at the top of the post, I used a small circle cutter and squeezed the top a little with my fingers. I put the peanut butter eggs on a baking sheet covered with wax paper and placed in the freezer for about an hour. When I was ready to coat the eggs, I melted the chocolate disks and coated each egg. Let the chocolate set and then eat or store in the freezer. 

Frittata Cups

 Ingredients: 

7 whole eggs

1 egg white

2 Tbsp Milk

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp pepper

3/4 cup cooked sausage or cubed ham

1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

In a large bowl, whisk the eggs, milk, salt, and pepper. Grease a muffin tin with cooking spray. (You can figure about 1 egg for each muffin tin, so this recipe amount will give you 8 frittata cups.) Put the meat and cheese in the bottom of each muffin tin. Top with the egg mixture until the tin is about 3/4 of the way full. Bake at 375 degrees for 22 minutes. Run a knife around the cup and take out of the muffin tin. 

St. Patrick's Day Party

For our St. Patrick's Day dinner party we had shamrock cheese bread, ravioli, pasta with pesto, green vegetables, Lucky Charm cookies, Irish cheesecake, and rainbow smoothies. 

Each layer of smoothie was made with frozen fruit, Greek yogurt, and orange juice.

Red: Frozen strawberries, one banana

Orange: Banana, fresh orange

Yellow: Banana and pineapple

Green: Banana, pineapple, and spinach

Blue: Banana, pineapple, spinach, and some blue food gel

Purple: Blueberries and banana

We love to do the Skittle experiment. We arranged the Skittles on the plate and poured water in the middle until the water reached the Skittles. Then the colors spread out. 

Academy Award Party

For our Academy Award party last year, we came up with food items that matched some of the movie nominees. That worked pretty well, so did the same thing this year. 

The one thing that is not tied to a movie is our traditional red carpet brownies. 

The movie/food line-up:

Belfast: Potato Pancakes

Coda: Fried Chicken

Don't Look Up: Asteroids (We baked mashed potatoes that we shaped into our own asteroid shapes and added craters) 

West Side Story: Ropa Vieja and gummy sharks

Cruella: Black and white cookies and a black/white/red trifle in a cocktail glass

Luca: Bowtie pasta

Licorice Pizza: fondant record 

King Richard: Gatorade

Encanto: Arepas

The Lost Daughter: orange peel rind snake

We got out the red carpet and trophy photo board. 

Pi Day Celebration

 March 14th is Pi Day. We celebrate Pi Day every year by eating circular foods and by doing some pi equations or crafts. This year we had cheese bread with a pepperoni pi symbol, mini circular protein pancakes, blueberries, cucumbers, cheese and crackers, and of course, pie. 

Rachel helped out by cutting the cheese into circles. 

We also did the Buffon's Needle experiment. That was really interesting and a lot of fun. 

Mario Day Party

We had a great time at our annual Mario Day party. This year I added the Mario cardboard play set and the Mario Kart track. We also put together some Mario Legos, had a Mario Kart tournament, and played Mario Slugger on the Wii. 

Some of the food we had...

We also did our annual question box piñatas. We filled them with candy and the kids jumped up and the tissue paper broke, dropping the candy over the kids' heads. 

 

Mario Kart Cardboard Track

McDonald's was giving out Mario Kart toys, and it was Mario Day on Mar. 10, so we decided to create our own Moo Moo Meadows Mario Kart track out of cardboard. (The majority of the track is shoe box lids. I hot glued them all together. Then I drew on a random track, painted the outside green, and outlined the track with Sharpie. We had some cows and fence pieces and other farm pieces from old toys the kids had. I made a few cardboard ramps, question boxes, and a windmill to complete the track. 

 

Read Across America Party

For National Read Across America Day, we matched our dinner to some of our favorite children's books. 

We had tacos for Dragons Love Tacos, pizza for Pizza Mouse and Curious George Makes Pizza, fruit and cheese with holes in them for Hungry Caterpillar, vegetable for Peter Rabbit, blueberries for Blueberries for Sal, green eggs for Green Eggs and Ham, strawberry and banana sticks for Cat in the Hat, ice cream for Should I Share my Ice Cream, and Cookies for If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. We also made a Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree out of a banana, spinach, and pie crust letters. 

We also made Oobleck out of cornstarch and water. 

Mardi Gras Party 2022

For dinner we had dirty rice, Cajun chicken tenders, and French fries. We also put together some green, yellow, and purple Jell-O trifles. 

We made masks out of cardstock. I just free-hand cut these. 

And of course we had our traditional King Cake! 

 

Cardboard Mario Playset

We decided to create a Mario playset out of cardboard for our annual Mario Day party this week. I used three shoe boxes to create the three stories. I used construction paper to cover the boxes and create a background. I bought some green cups from the dollar store to make the tunnels, added some foam cutouts of clouds and hills, and created the other 3-D pieces from cardboard and a foam block. The mini characters can even go down through the tunnels (toilet and paper towel rolls painted). I had some Mario coins that I added to the foam blocks as well and made the flag pole out of a dowel rod. The castle is just painted on the background of the top layer. 

I hot glued the layers together after I cut holes in the boxes to run the tunnels through.