Kids Co-op - Playdough Ice cream parlour

 
<center> <a href="http://www.tamingthegoblin.com/search/label/kids%20coop"></p> <p> <font color="#808080" face="'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/FkLk8.jpg" title="Hosted by imgur.com" alt="" /></a></font></p> <p> <font color="#808080" face="'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 16px; white-space: pre-wrap;"></center> Its Kids Co-op time again, please link up your posts and check out what others have been up to. This week I am linking the following: ****** (Goblin is 38 months)

Goblin has enjoyed imaginary play for a while now but most of it seems to revolve around fire engines and putting out fires or being on a train. The most extreme (ie not vehicle based) has been fishing! Goblin was given a play kitchen last Christmas and it has sat mostly unused in our living room all year. But this week something has shifted in his imaginary play and suddenly his scenarios are much wider than vehicles. He has been cooking us dinner and making cups of tea for his toys and feeding his horse using our wooden cutting fruit.

This new style of play got me excited and I wanted to find a way of helping facilitate it. I settled on playdough ice cream. This idea is not my own, I know I have seen it on someone else's blog over the summer, most likely either The Imagination tree or Nurturestore both of which have a trillion amazing playdough ideas. Unfortunately when I went searching I couldn't find it to reference it - however I did find a new post from Play Create Explore with an exciting recipe for ice cream playdough.  

To make the cones I used some of our cardboard boxes from Christmas and cut circles with a quarter cut out (packman heads). I folded these round and taped them down. I used Nurturestore's basic playdough recipe to quickly throw together a batch of white playdough. Then I divided it up and asked Goblin what colours he wanted. He opted for pink, red and green - we already had the orange and white stuff (home made playdough lasts forever if you store it in an airtight container).  I would have added some essential oils to make them smell of something but I was in a bit of a hurry as I'd promised Goblin I'd produce his ice cream parlour by the time he'd tidied away his train set and cars. 

Goblin set to work making ice cream for me and Hublet and himself. We used pony beads as sprinkles.  I was surprised how long this game lasted. Between making them and pretending to eat them, and then feeding them to his imaginary kittens we must have played for a good 45 minutes. And when he was done I rather anally separated out all the colours and stored them in their own little boxes to be used again. 

And now to the linky


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Hublet and Boy cooking - Chocolate Spiders

(Goblin is 0 moths old)

An unhealthy cooking post you say?  It must be Hublet time again.

I will confess two things, that this barely counts as cooking and that Goblin did most of the work.

Today we will be making chocolate spiders.  Which Goblin was glad to learn does not mean arachnids dipped in chocolate (although, he is rather fond of chocolate so might have eaten a real spider anyway).

They are made of noodles covered in chocolate and peanut butter.

Please note, the below recipe may contain traces of nuts.  To reduce the risk, I recommend you have everyone present eat a spoonful of peanut butter to test for allergies.  If someone goes into anaphylactic shock they may be allergic to nuts and should not eat any of the chocolate spiders.

I had never heard of these until a British friend who is currently living in Australia mentioned them on facebook and I became intrigued.

Apparently they are quite a normal thing to make over there, particularly for kids as they don’t require cooking.

I didn’t know what proportions I was supposed to use, but this was my guess at a recipe:

One pack of instant noodles (flavour sachet removed, I don’t think chow mein spices would really go with it)

One 200g bar of milk chocolate (minus all the bits Goblin ate during production)

100g (ish) of peanut butter

Highly complex directions:

1 – Chuck the peanut butter and chocolate in a bowl and microwave until melted

2 – Crumble the noodles into the melted goo

3 – Mix

4 – Put dollops in a muffin tin

5 – Refrigerate

6 – Eat

I liked this activity more than regular baking though.  Goblin is still not great at following directions so the exact measurements needed for proper baking make it a bit stressful.

Anything involving an oven is also hard as Goblin wants to look at it all the time which cools the oven and risks him burning himself.

The most dangerous thing this had was slightly warm chocolate, the main risk of which is type 2 diabetes.

Goblin liked the different textures when breaking up the chocolate and the noodles, sometimes letting him destroy things in a controlled manner is enormously satisfying.

Putting the paper cases in the muffin tray was a nice challenging activity, particularly separating them out.

Spooning out the same amount into each paper case was fun too, I was able to get Goblin to work out which cases needed more put in to even them out (apparently the answer is: one case needs all the mixture).

Goblin even carried them to the fridge, but struggled a bit with the idea that they had to leave them in there for a prolonged period.

I’m not sure if this is how they are meant to turn out, but I thought they were delicious.  Sort of like crunchy Reeses Cups.

Goblin wasn’t too interested in eating them after all that, so Monko and I had to take one for the team and devour them.

To make up for it I made Goblin a blueberry cake while he was asleep.  It has 500g of blueberries in the cake, icing, and on top.  Which I am pretty sure makes it healthy.

I am not diet friendly….

Toodle pip

*****

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