Skip to main content

Carolina Wren cake

There are some mighty creative people in the world: scientists, artists, inventors, and so on.  But for my money, no one can beat a 5 year old boy for sheer volume of ideas.  Most of which are bad...

One example: in the 30 minutes that I was trying to make pancakes for dinner the other day, Luke had the idea and executed a recipe for "Carolina Wren Cake."  It started with some yeast, sugar and water from an earlier "experiment".  He added oats, sunflower seeds, 3 tablespoons corn syrup, some flour and cinnamon. (Luke was looking for the cinnamon and picked out the chili powder, cumin and coriander.  I managed to convince him that those were not the spices he was looking for.)  I added a few more tablespoons of flour and some salt, he kneaded it, we let it rise and baked it at 350 for about 20 minutes.  He was a bit disappointed that there wasn't enough for rolls, but   it was actually quite tasty.  The biggest problem is that none of the kids will eat it... =)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Things that are true

"Axial tilt is the reason for the season." (Picture a globe with the northern hemisphere tilted away from the sun...) I believe this is meant to be an anti-theist slogan, although I would point out that I believe there is a reason for the axial tilt. This is a runner up to my favorite true science picture, the "Gravity Forecast." I linked to this when I was a graduate student, but the site is long since down. Picture a weather forecast graphic, but instead of clouds and temperatures, the 5-day forecast predicts 9.8 m/s^2 down. Even the idea still makes me laugh, perhaps I will reproduce it someday. Luke cut his 4th tooth today (Finally!). So far they haven't caused us too much trouble. We'll see what happens when he gets his canines.

Science at home

We had a fun "experiment" yesterday. We took a 2 liter bottle of diet Coke and some Mentos, put 4 Mentos at the same time into the bottle, and shot a huge jet of soda into the air about 8 feet high! It was quite exciting, although I think the warnings that you might want to use eye protection were a bit overblown. I suppose that it was an experiment only in the loosest sense of the term, but Michael forsees lots of fun in the future: using other types of soda, other methods for adding the mentos to the soda, and so on. It did get us out of the house for a while, and had Eleanor and Amanda dropping mentos into the used soda bottle and watching to see what happened---so cute!

A day at the fair

Yesterday afternoon the whole family went to the NC state fair. We had a good enough time that I think we are going back next year, although perhaps we will leave Luke at home with a sitter. We went right after Eleanor's school. Michael picked up Eleanor, I drove Luke and Amanda. Through an amazing bit of timing, we met in the parking lot and walked to the fair together, about a 10 minute walk (not bad at all, really). I had meant to get to the fair much earlier and see the parts that Eleanor and Michael claimed not to be interested in (the animals and crafts, mostly) but I was running a little late. Our area has been in a serious drought for the past few months, so I am not complaining that it rained (hard) on us as we were getting to the gate. But it does seem a bit hard that we planned to go to the fair on the one day in the past 3 months that we had a rainstorm. Fortunately, the rain was scattered, and the clouds soon moved off to water another area. We took the opportun...