Dr Seuss meal planning and other projects

I've been learning to make frosting this week. I've made three types and read about 40 recipes (I am not exaggerating) to figure out what each ingredient is supposed to do. This afternoon I had moved on to reading about making your own sprinkles when the Storyteller called, "Mama? Mama!" I turned to him and focused on his face. He was squinting his eyes. Maybe that's why it suddenly appeared that he was made of frosting. In that one nanosecond I could see how to make the depressions that would be the eye slits, could imagine what dye ratio to use to make his lips that color.

I thought I was getting enough sleep, but maybe I should spend less time planning crafty projects and more time in bed. We have a bunch of projects coming up for our spring equinox celebration, and it is time to start seeds. Hopefully I'll figure out something to sew up for the little girl cousins' birthdays, and we just celebrated Dr Seuss' birthday. Oh, I should blog that, right?

Mostly our celebration was all about food, but the day started off with the Hero going to school with a green star on his belly. I tried to draw it furry, using randomish vertical strokes of green to outline it. We were unable to remove it in the bath that night. No apparatus was available to us, though, so he's still wearing it. I put washable markers on the shopping list.

I used food coloring on some mashed potatoes to match the colors of the truffula trees. Green food coloring made the eggs Seussian. I don't do ham.

I made Thing One and Thing Two cupcakes. I also relied on color to get the point across there.

I used a strawberry cake mix. The strawberry cake would normally be pink but I put in two entire containers (those little ones that look like gnomes with pointed hats) of red food coloring. I felt fortunate that we could not taste the dye. Even with that, if I hadn't used magenta cupcake liners, it wouldn't have come out a proper Seussian shade of red. I had in fact resigned myself to magenta cupcakes before I put them in the oven. They came out perfectly, though. Well, the first batch came out perfectly. I forgot to turn the second batch off before I went to pick up the Scientist and the Hero from school, so they came out crunchy and brown. The house smelled very nice when we walked in the door. Apparently two hours is the right time to bake strawberry cupcakes to make the whole house smell like strawberries. (Yeah, it takes an hour and a half to get the kids home. Ask me how much I love that.)

I put chocolate sprinkles inside the batter so that there would be some black in the cupcakes to complete the Thing color scheme, maybe half a cup. I eyeballed it.

The frosting on the Thing cupcakes is cream cheese with powdered sugar. If it was not cream cheese, we'd all have had headaches and sore throats from sugar overload because there is as much frosting in each of these as there is cake. I saved out some white but made most of it light blue by adding a small amount of blue food coloring. I made a mound shape of the white in the middle of that layer. To make the spikes I used a baggie with the tip cut off, nothing fancy, and squeezed it out in quick little spurts, breaking them off the bag suddenly. It also helped to make the spikes to stick a toothpick in, then pull it out.

Girl cousin and her mama made the cool hat. It was an Amazon box, and there was red duct tape, but that's all I know. We took turns wearing it at dinner, and read The Lorax aloud during dessert.


I've never celebrated Seuss' birthday before. This year we did because the Hero wanted to do it. We rotate which kid gets to pick dinner on Wednesdays, and this Wednesday it was my little boy's turn to pick. Knowing it was Dr. Seuss' birthday, he asked for green eggs and ham. From there, it was just too much fun not to come up with Seussian foods. There are so many. It was a pretty great celebration. I suspect we're going to do it again next year.