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. 

Two's Day Party (2-22-22)

 We celebrated 2-22-22 by having lots of famous pairs for food and by doing some crafts that were centered around the number 2. 

For dinner we had Burger and Friday, Fish and Chips, Mac and Cheese, Cheese and Crackers, Chips and Dip, Bread and Butter, Cookies and Milk, Twin Pops, Double Bubble, Pears, and Zebra Cakes. 

We played a game where we rolled two die, added the sum, and the person rolling could then color in a square displaying that number. If there wasn't a square available to color, the person lost their turn. The person that had the most squares colored at the end was the winner.  

We used tangrams to make the shape of 2. We matched famous pairs and then found the answers in a word search. We also talked about what the kids thought their lives would be like when they are 22. 

2022 Super Bowl Party

The referees are made from sugar wafer cookies. I dipped the bottom in white chocolate and the tip of the top in milk chocolate. I attached half of a melting disc to the top to make it look like a hat. Than I put some melted milk chocolate in a ziploc bag and piped on the eyes, mouth, and shirt stripes. 

For this meatball calzone, I used half of a roll of pizza dough and cut it in the shape of a football. I put meatballs, marinara, and mozzarella cheese on top of the pizza dough. I used a rolling pin to roll out the remaining dough and covered the meatball mixture. I had a little bit of pretzel dough left so I put that on as the laces. I covered it all in an egg wash and baked this on a greased pan for 25 minutes at 350 degrees. 

We each picked 20 squares. 

Our commercial bingo cards are all printed and ready too.