Kids and a Mom in the Kitchen: Monkey Bread

Two weeks ago when I posted our first Kids and a Mom in the Kitchen post I had one person link up.  Suzanne over at My Buddies and I posted about the great refrigerator dough that she makes with her buddies to make rolls and yummy monkey bread. I knew I was going to have to make monkey bread soon. I've always wanted to try it. What better time to make monkey bread than when we are learning about the rainforest while reading the book The Great Kapok Tree by Lynne Cherry and learning about the animals that live there, monkeys included. So last week we made monkey bread.

First we gathered the ingredients...

...while Tabitha read them off the recipe card for us.

1/2 cup white sugar
2 cups hot water
1 egg, beaten
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 pkg active dry yeast (or 2 1/4 tsp)
1/2 cup cooking oil
7 cups flour

She had a little trouble understanding the 1/2 was the same as 1 over 2 equaling a half.

Then we added the ingredients. For the complete directions head on over to My Buddies and I.

And I taught the girls how to knead the dough.

Then we let it rise. As it got to late, we just put it in the refrigerator to sit for the night. We made the monkey bread the next day.

Here are the directions straight from My Buddies and I

Prepare your pan by greasing it and dropping about 3 tsps of butter on the bottom of the pan. Sprinkle a few tbsps of brown sugar on top of that. Melt about 1/4 to 1/3 cups of butter in a bowl in the microwave. In another bowl take about 3/4 cup of brown sugar and add about a tsp of cinnamon and mix.

Now, take your dough, and cut it into little bits, about the size of big marbles. Kids love rolling these balls, dipping them into the butter, then the sugar mix and dropping them in the pan. They don't have to be perfect, either and they will taste great! 

  We had a little assembly line going. I gave them bits of dough, Tabitha put it in the melted butter and Amelia rolled it in the cinnamon sugar and placed it in the pan.

When the pan is about one third to one half full, pour any left over melted butter and sugar on the top. Then let rise until doubled in size. It takes a couple of hours. Bake in a 400 degree F oven for about 20 minutes. The top will be golden brown. Flip the pan over onto a plate and let the monkey bread release.

Once again I had some proud little girls. Oh, and the monkey bread did not last long at all. Yummy. We have plans to make it again soon. I definitely recommend this recipe.

Do you have your children help you in the kitchen?  What lessons do they learn? Do you have any kid friendly recipes to share?

I'd love to see your posts, whether you have done something this week or some time in the past. Just link up below. I'm thinking of making this a weekly link up (still thinking). 

I am linking up to:

And here is my Kids and a Mom in the Kitchen linky

Kids and a Mom in the Kitchen #1 : Muddy Buddies

I love being able to bake with the girls in the kitchen. We have been using this opportunity for quite a while to work on math skills in addition to the cooking skills that one would first think about being learned in the kitchen.  One of the first things the girls ever helped me with was reconstituting frozen orange juice. We worked on pouring and stirring, but we also learned to count to three and subtract one. For instance, "We needed three cans of juice, we just added one, how many more do we need." I would show them three fingers, take away one and they would answer two. We would continue this way until we were done. As they got older we started talking about fractions and seeing that two half teaspoons/or cups would equal one whole teaspoon/or cup. Then we would work on 1/4 teaspoon/cup. Now I started adding reading to our kitchen time. Yesterday I had Tabitha read me the ingredient list for Chex Muddy Buddies because she hadn't had any other reading time.

As she read the ingredients, I gathered them and placed them on the counter.

Then we started measuring ingredients. We needed 9 cups of Chex cereal. So, we had to decide if we wanted 5 cups of one and 4 cups of the other, or if we wanted 4 1/2 cups of both. We opted for the latter.

Then Amelia measured out the butter with me.

Watching the butter, peanut butter and chocolate chips melt.

All stirred together.

Some proud little girls holding dessert for dinner.

Do you have your children help you in the kitchen?  What lessons do they learn? Do you have any kid friendly recipes to share?

I'd love to see your posts, whether you have done something this week or some time in the past. Just link up below. I'm thinking of making this a weekly link up. 

Muffin Tin Monday Part 2: Shapes (plus)

Today I wanted to work on the children's green collages because the pictures they had colored have been sitting patiently waiting to be cut up and made into something.  When I scheduled my days for this "school year" I forgot we were in the middle of our number/color lessons from the summer.  So today after the girls colored their "p" pictures I had them cut, tear and glue green items onto a piece of paper.  Because today's Muffin Tin Monday theme was shapes I tried to focus a little on shapes with their collage.  I searched through the foam bead shapes and found some circles, hearts and squares. They each got 2 green pompoms.  I gave the girls some green construction paper cut into triangles, rectangles and squares.  They were allowed to cut this up however they wanted to, except for the large triangle that I had them place in a corner of their paper.

Then I made the muffin tins while they watched their Signing Time show.  I have to tell you, I think I got confused on what the theme was supposed to be.  It's supposed to be shapes.  Well, it still is, but it took on a life of its own as I was searching (once again last minute) to find foods that would work.  And we ended up with a shapes/orange muffin tin.

2 cheese triangles

2 square peanut butter on cheese crackers

5 fish shaped crackers (pushing it a bit on this one, huh?)

1 oval hard boiled egg

5 circle carrots

2 crescent peach slices 

(Though Tabitha didn't quite think they were crescents, maybe wedges?)

The eggs were last minute so fresh from the pan.  If anyone else struggles with making hard boiled eggs that come out of the shell easily, let me share what I discovered today.  I was reading some directions here but only took part of the advice and mine turned out perfectly.

I did 3 eggs, one each for each of us.

Placed them in lukewarm water.

Put the flame on high and brought to a boil, added a sprinkle of salt while they were coming to the boil.

When they were at a boil I turned the flame to low so they would simmer for 10 minutes.

I ran them under cold water, alternating draining and adding more cold water 'til the eggs were warm and easy to handle.

I gently tapped them 3-4 times in different spots and peeled.

Perfect

I waited about 10 minutes to peel mine and the shell stuck in one spot, could have been a fluke, or could mean it's better to peel right away, don't even wait 10 minutes.

Then we played a game with the Preschool Printable: Shapes Around Me that I discovered over at Carissa's blog, 1+1+1=1 yesterday.  I cut the pieces out and put the rectangle cards in the center with the shapes in a circle surrounding them.

I drew one card at a time and had the girls look at the pictures.  I had them tell me what shape all the pictures showed, then they were to find the shape on the floor that matched.

Amelia had a hard time trying to understand she was to pick one off the floor not on the card.  The girl who found the shape kept the card and put it down in front of her.  Of course I insisted that Tabitha let Amelia take her turns.

Here I thought Amelia had the right one

Then she went on to just keep pointing at shapes.

Oh well.  Something to work on.

Head on over to Muffin Tin Mom  to see other's muffin tins

S lessons

Well this week was far from spectacular. Another week of next to nothing.

Lots of plans+no energy+appointments= nothing done.

We were going to start the letter Ss. I printed out pictures. I had some ideas for projects. Guess next week will be here soon enough.

Here is what we did get accomplished, minus pictures because the camera has not yet been found :(

I took 4 books out of the library and we did read them quite a bit. We even took one to playgroup, along with The Rainbow Fish, this week. It is called "The Biggest Snowball of All" by Jane Belk Moncure. This book focuses on sizes: big, bigger, biggest and wide, narrow to give a couple of examples. They start out with a teeny tiny snowball and it becomes big enough to turn into a house, but returns to teeny after the sun comes out. We also read "The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats. Little Peter wakes up to find it had snowed during the night. We followed him on his snowy adventures and grieved with him as he discovered his snowball he had wanted to keep had melted. Seemed appropriate that we had too books that brought up melting snow, as that is what the snow has done around here the last few days. We were even able to take walks a couple of times this week. We discovered melted snowmen in one yard. Also very convenient as I had found a great idea at someone's blog for Melted Snowman Soup. You take:

Cream of Potato soup (prepared as directed)

Mini carrots (I had already cooked them to soften them a couple of days earlier)

and Peas

When these ingredients are combined it really does look like a snowman has melted right there in your bowl. I made sure to position the girls' veges so there were 2 peas above a carrot and some below to make it look like the face. Unfortunately, the girls weren't too fond of the soup. I did get Tabitha to eat some of her veges. I don't think the carrots were soft enough for Amelia though because I found the one I thought she had eaten chewed up on the plate. (Sorry if tmi).

(Please if you see this post and you have posted about Melted Snowman Soup let me know. I have searched and searched and can't for the life of me figure out where I saw this recipe)

We also made suns. I traced a 3" circle onto white paper and 2" high isosceles triangles (8) around the circle. I wrote the word "sun" in dots under the sun. Then I photocopied it onto light blue paper to represent the sky. Then I cut the same shapes out of yellow paper and the girls glued them on to the pattern. Wow, was Tabitha ever so precise. Amelia struggled with the triangles but did well with the circle. And Tabitha did a great job tracing the letters.

I almost forgot. We also read 2 other books (and will continue to read for the next week). "Sam: the sound of 's'" by Alice K. Flanagan (a simple phonics book about a sand crab and, once again, the hot sun) and "The Very Busy Spider" by Eric Carle (a book about the spider spinning a web in the barnyard surrounded by friendly animals and a pesky fly. It's fun to see the spider's web take shape and be able to say the animal sounds). I'm sure most of the people reading this post know this book, but I thought I would share what I like about it. I think this is one of my favorite Eric Carle books. I like that you can actually feel the web too.

Anyway, the girls wanted something else to do after finishing their sun, and Tabitha specifically asked for more dots to connect, so I made a dotted spider for them to trace. An oval body and 8 legs made out of dots with a dotted line to represent the spider's silk. Then we sang "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" a couple of times.

The Montessori activities remained untouched this week. I hope to change up a few and start some new activities this week. Hopefully I will find my camera, because it will be easier to explain things with pictures.

Speaking of pictures, our word cards for this week are: sun, sled, snake, snail, stop and squirrel. All of which I was able to find sign language signs for.

To see what others are doing with their preschoolers and toddlers head on over to Homeschool Creations and 1+1+1=1.