Kid-friendly baking activities fill the long days of Dec break
Plus dystopian teen fiction to fulfill your inner middle schooler.
Hello! It’s Annemarie. There’s so much school break behind us, and so much more ahead of us. The days seem to stretch on and on, don’t they? My kids were occupied for approximately .5 seconds by the L.O.L.s they got (read this article from NY Times Parenting now) and have been building Lego kits the rest of the break. As is the theme of today’s newsletter: It could be worse.
We’ve also been baking and eating, repeat until we explode. I like baking because it’s one of those things that once you have the right tools, it’s easy to pull something together to can keep your whiny children occupied. But after writing all of it out below, I’m rolling my own eyes, so do with this info what you will.
What I’ve read this week
I discovered that book two of the dystopian YA series The Rule of One is out and free for Kindle Unlimited (which I think Prime members get? I have no idea), so I’m reading The Rule of Many. The series is familiar territory: America is a vast wasteland where superstorms have made much of it unlivable and there’s no value placed on human life, and everyone is electronically monitored. Blah, blah, blah. The fiction part is that as a result, there’s a China-like one-child law in place. It’s a fast read and makes me feel like, “Hey, things could always be worse!”
I also renewed my Audible subscription and I’ve been listening to comedian Maysoon Zayid’s Audible-original memoir (I’ve discovered that my audiobook sweet spot is memoir narrated by the writer herself). She’s incredibly charming but man, does that woman like to hang her hat on a cliché.
Psychedelic cupcakes
The only think mind-trippy about these cupcakes is the color. But if you want to make these adults-only, there are tons of recipes online for cannabutter. Though I recommend you do that while the kids are at the grandparents’. (I’ll tell you the story of the infamous brownie baking episode another time.) But basically, if you have a couple of piping tips, you can bake cupcakes, make buttercream, dye it, stick it in a piping bag with a piping tip and the squeeze on a pattern. I really suck at decorating and this makes it look like I know what I’m doing. My kids and I and a friend of mine did the ones above.
Sugar cookies as canvas
cookies + royal icing + edible markers
1) Make or buy sugar cookies. I like King Arthur Flour’s Rollout Sugar Cookies recipe. I cut them into simple circles (you can even use a glass if you don’t have cookie cutters). The important thing is to just create something that will be a blank canvas. Or just buy un-iced cookies from the store and ice them yourself OR ask a bakery to just do a solid color of royal icing.
2) Spread on royal icing. The biggest pain in the ass about making royal icing is finding the meringue powder in the grocery store. If you plan ahead, you can buy it online (and apparently the Pioneer Woman has a substitute that uses pasteurized eggs, but I can’t even wrap my mind around that concept.) Now, when you’re decorating cookies with piping tips and being fancy, you’re supposed to outline it and then flood them. But for this, all you need to do is take a knife and spread on the royal icing in a single layer and then wait for it to dry. Depending on how thick your layer is, it can take an hour or you can leave it overnight.
3) Use edible markers to decorate. You can buy edible markers for like $5 from Amazon, Michaels, or directly from Wilton. They draw really easily and are basically just food coloring so it’s nontoxic.
Okay, I get after reading all of this, where you’d be like, “This is insane and I’m not doing it.” But you can have the kids help at all three stages, and it’s one of those things looks really impressive and keeps them occupied. So, hey, it could be worse.
Thanks for reading!
Dorothy will be back soon. Follow me on Instagram. Kids go back to school on Jan 2. Quiet is within our grasp.
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