Saturday, May 26, 2012

Bears on the Beach and Cake Parfaits

On Friday we had a beach theme. We went to the beach in the afternoon/evening and made another blue Jello dessert called Bears on the Beach.

Blue Jello (ocean)
Crushed graham cracker or light colored cookie (sand)
Whipped Topping (frothy water from the waves)
Gummy Bears or Teddy Grahams (beach patrons)
Drink Umbrellas (sun protection)

A few shots at the beach. My girls all have matching bathing suits that I bought on clearance at Target last year. It makes it easy to keep track of them when we are out.

When we came home from the beach the kids showered, put on their pajamas, and then we assembled our Bears on the Beach. I had no idea it would be as entertaining as it was. They all assembled theirs differently, and they insisted that they had to explain what was going on in their Jello scene. I think the biggest novelty for them was the drink umbrella. George refused to remove his from his cup while he was eating, despite the fact that it was annoyingly in the way the whole time.

Group Shot
 (minus George, who is off to the side)

My favorite was George's which looked like his bears were bear-ied under a couple feet of snow in a winter wonderland. (bottom left). A couple of kids had a bear drowning in the water too. Or maybe they were just scuba diving.

I also had a great plan to make some homemade moon sand to go with our beach theme, but I was tired in the afternoon and instead chose to rest in my bedroom for an hour before we went to the beach. I think I made a good choice. The kids will have to take a rain check on the moon sand. Maybe we will have a space themed week sometime this summer.

....So that was Friday.

On Thursday we made cake parfaits. Just a little concoction of our own. I don't even know if cake can officially be labeled as "parfait", but it was an idea that popped into my head and it sounded yummy and pretty.

We made a box cake mix, divided it into six bowls, and dyed it the colors of the rainbow. 
We baked them in empty and cleaned tuna cans (well greased and floured).
We baked them.
We sliced the rounded tops off.
We took a biscuit cutter and cut off the browned edges so the pretty cake colored showed in our layers.
We sliced each color in half, so we could make two parfaits.
We layered them in rainbow order with Cool Whip in between each layer.
We ate them!
(We had leftover batter that we layered into two 1 cup mason jars and also baked. I forgot to take a picture though. Shame on me! It was really cool though because the layers did not bake evenly so it was kind of swirly and psychedelically groovy looking.)

Cakes in the tuna cans. Thankfully they did not taste like tuna.

The rainbow cake parfait.

Each kid got to eat the cake top to the color they mixed.

I am pleased to say that Jason accomplished his cleaning on Thursday (with a lot of coaching) and was rewarded his chocolate parfait. He ate it instead of the rainbow cake parfait.

As I proofread this post, I am beginning to think that my readers might be thinking that all we eat is sugar in this house. I promise we get a good share of fruits, vegetables, whole wheat bread, cheese and other nutritious stuff. But I don't think to take pictures of my kids eating carrots, turkey sandwiches, apples, bananas, oranges, or watermelon. You'll just have to believe me. Right now my kids are reaping the benefits of having a pregnant mother who feels like eating just about anything and everything.

34 weeks prego with a farmer's tan. And those extra pounds from the anything and everything that I've been eating are mostly on my thighs, which I conveniently cropped off the picture. 

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