Mar 10, 2011

Fresh Orange Treat


Just a quick food post for you today. I've done a few food related posts in the past, but they are mostly just fun and aren't actually healthy in any way shape or form ;) For example the giant cookie pizzas and spaghetti hotdog freakshow. I did do a post about an orange treat a couple of years ago, but um, well, I filled an orange with Jello, so, er, not a terribly healthy treat either! Well, this time I've got a treat that is both cute, fun, and involves eating fresh fruit! It's really cheap too, because you just need half an orange for each dessert and the kids love them because they look all dinky and tea partyish.

Here's how you put them together...

Chop your orange in half, so that you get the navel parts at the bottom center of each half.

Next take one of your halfs and chop the bottom off it (keep that bottom bit to use later)

Now you will have a ring of peel that you can cut around with a knife to extract the edible part of the orange inside. This is the trickiest part and really it's not tricky at all. You just want to insert your knife at the edge of the pith and carefully rotate the orange on the chopping board to cut out it's center, leaving the peel in a complete ring.


Sit this ring with the wide side up (it's going to make the little bowl for the orange treat to sit in). Then turn the little base bit that you cut off upside down and pop it into the ring to make the bottom of the peel bowl. Now flip the edible part of the orange you cut out over so that it's widest flat surface is on the chopping board.

Cut it into six sections with your knife and pick it all up and place it into the peel bowl that you have made.

Then you get to decide how much of a treat you want it to be ;) I let my kids use a cocktail stick to eat the orange pieces because they are five and six years old, so aren't likely to hurt themselves with them, but I'd give a smaller kid a little fork. The kids like a bit of dried pineapple and a marachino cherry with theirs.

If you want to avoid the cocktail stick then a squirt of whipped cream and a cherry looks very treaty too. There must be loads of ways to dress this cute little dessert up to your own tastes :)

I don't know if your kids are anything like mine, but if my kids asked if there was dessert and I came back with "Why yes! Dessert today is half an orange!" I would be met with incredulous stares and likely be informed that half an orange wasn't a kid approved dessert, but they totally go for it when it's presented in this cute way and it only takes about 30 seconds to make each one.


I'd just like to take a moment to say that if you have emailed me recently and are waiting patiently for a response, I really am trying to get through my mail to write back to readers. We've had two birthdays and our anniversary last week and the last month has been a even more of a circus than things usually are around here. A nice and fun circus, but I'm a rather tired and pregnant ring master, so bare with me :)

Mar 6, 2011

Mardi Gras Masks from Recycling

We made some Mardi Gras masks over the weekend out of our left over craft supplies and some stuff that was in the recycling bin. If you want to read the entire tutorial then pop over to the post on Alpha Mom, here to read about it and see all the photos.



I blogged about Mardi Gras masks three years ago on Filth Wizardry. They are a great way to let the kids go beserk with the glue. The ones we made back when the kids were really little were with old airline sleep masks and white glue. If you do decide to make some and you happen to have extra cardboard and some Dollar Store crepe paper streamers handy then these dresses would really complete the Carnival look :)

If you're more of the Pancake Day type than the Mardi Gras type then here's a link to the first ever post I wrote on Filth Wizardry back in 2008, showing the pancake art the kids love so much. Now that they are older and we have mustard bottles, they are capable of making their own squiggly pancake drawings.

Crafts from the archives here that might be useful to you for St Patrick's Day are these...

Last link is to Paul's latest contraption. He made the girls a hanging rail to go above their dressing up box, out of some PVC pipe over the weekend. It's made their bedroom look a lot less like an explosion in Goodwill ;)