Kids in the Kitchen---Jell-O Playdough

 Grace wanted to do some cooking, so I thought some Jell-o playdough would be the perfect recipe for her.

You need:

1 cup flour

1/2 cup salt

1 cup warm water

2 Tbls cream of tartar

2 Tbls vegetable oil

1 box 3oz. jello

 Mix all the ingredients in a saucepan.

 Mix everything together

 Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until

 the playdough thickens and pulls away from the sides of the pan.

 As the playdough cools, knead it until nice and smooth.

 Wonderful job, Grace!  And it smells delicious!!



Kids in the Kitchen: Patriotic Popsicles

It has been a long time since I have posted a "Kids in the Kitchen" post.  This past week I was encouraged to jump back into things and plan on a Kids in the Kitchen post once a week.

Hopefully I can keep up.  (Thanks for the encouragement, Diane) 

This week, in honor of the upcoming 4th of July, we decided to make patriotic popsicles.

I found the idea on the Family Fun website.

 For these popsicles you need:

blue kool aid (and sugar)

red kool aid (and sugar)

vanilla yogurt

Cool whip

plastic cups

craft sticks

 Make up the blue Kool aid.

This is the first layer in your cup.

 Clear cups make is more fun, as you watch your patriotic progress.

 As we proceeded with this, I realized we added too much "blue" to our popsicles. About an inch of each layer would be plenty.

Put this blue layer in the freezer for about an hour--until it is beginning to freeze, but not yet hard.

 For the white layer, mix about 1 cup vanilla yogurt and 1 cup whipped topping.

 This is a very yummy, white layer.

 Spoon the yogurt mixture onto the blue, semi frozen blue kool aid.

 Add the craft sticks at this time.

 We are able to place the sticks all the way to the bottom of the cup.

Freeze this layer until solid. (The yogurt never got completely hard--but was very firm when we added the red layer.)

Pour red Kool aid over the yogurt layer....this completes our patriotic popsicles.

I froze these overnight.

 To remove popsicles from the cups, we simply held them in our hands for a few minutes (it also was very hot outside)  and them they "popped" out of the cups.

Enjoy!!!

Kids in the Kitchen---The Creamiest Hot Cocoa

Perfect for our northern snowy days, this hot cocoa is so creamy and chocolately, it is just as easy and so much more yummy than those little packets---it a family favorite.
For about 12 servings---which we need around here---start with 2 cans of sweetened condensed milk.

Dump both cans of condensed milk into a big pan.

Turn the stove onto medium heat.

Add one cup of baking cocoa to the milk.

Stir this together completely over medium heat.

Stir in 3 teaspoons of vanilla

Add 1/4 tsp. of salt

Slowly add 8 cups of water

Stir until siblings from outside smell the hot cocoa and come inside.

Do not bring to a boil!

Prepare the proper mugs.

I also found this marshmallow bits at our Amish store. They are just like the "Swiss Miss" marshmallows!! Very yummy all on their own!!

My kids enjoy the marshmallow "on the side".

Be careful if your hands are a little wet, it will be hard to get them off your fingers. The more you lick the more they stick!!

ENJOY!!

Kids in the Kitchen--Christmas Rice-Krispie Balls

You can't get much easier that these yummy little Christmas treats!

We mixed up the regular rice-krispie treat recipe, and then turned them into something for Christmas.

Of course, butter is a favorite part of these treats...
along with the marshmallows.

It is tough stirring , but Gracie got the job done.

We mixed some pretty Christmas candy sprinkles into the rice-krispie treats at this time.

Now is was time to butter our hands--a very important step in the process of these messy balls.

I gave each child a bunch of goo and they formed it into a ball.

A perfect face

Messy and sticky--but a lot of fun!

I finally decided that I need to make the balls, hand them to the kids and they rolled them into sprinkles.

This would be the clean-up commitee!

Enjoy!