Bunny Cakes

This was something the girls had been asking to make all week. I picked up a copy of Bunny Cakes by Rosemary Wells from Goodwill. Goodwill and Savers are my favourite places for books because they are never more than $1.39, even for the monumentally cool hardbacks, which would set you back 15 to 25 buckeroos a pop if bought new. Of course the library is free, but as a reward strategy, a whole new book for $1.39 kicks the pants off some candy.Anyhoo, this book is one from the Max and Ruby series (also on tv as an animation in the US, on NickJr). It's a very sweet story about Max and his big sister Ruby making cakes for their grandma's birthday. Ruby makes an angel surprise cake with raspberry fluff icing and Max makes an earthworm cake with red hot marshmallow squirters.

The kids had been asking to make these cakes all week. They really wanted to make Ruby's cake and said Max's cake was gross, so we all made a cake together using a box of cake mix. Yeah, Martha Stewart would have an embolism reading this, but the cake mixes are great for preschooler baking. I've got them as cheap as a dollar on sale and the kids drool over the box graphics and photo of the cake, then there's the easy to follow recipe and cooking instructions, WITH PICTURES!!! so it's really easy and fun.

While the cake was cooking the kids played with the many shades of grey and brown playdough that have evolved from all the playdough activities we've been doing recently. They made various reconstructions of Max's earthworm cake with string for worms and cut up bits of these weird red plastic popsicle sticks for the marshmallow squirters. One of my mates gave me a bunch of kid craft gear for my birthday last year and these popsicle sticks were in the bag. They are kind of like corrugated cardboard in structure, but plastic and in different colours. The kids find them really easy to snip up with kiddy scissors, so they worked great for this.

Once the cake was baked I cut it and put jam in the middle, then iced the sides and the kids iced the top and stuck on marshmallows and sprinkles.

Then, while I cooked dinner (no cake before dinner because I am clearly a fascist dictator), the kids played cutting out and colouring "Bunny Money" from Rosemary Wells' website. Looking around there are some good Max and Ruby games and colouring bits on the web. Some on Rosemary's site and some on Nick Jr, including this awesome Max and Ruby dollhouse puppet theatre, which we will have to do soon because the kids will go nuts for it.

After dinner we scoffed some cake and read the book again. Mmmmm cakeface.Can you think of any other children's books about cooking that you've read that could be adapted to allow kids to reinact the story in the kitchen? No, we're not doing George's Marvelous Medicine! I so wanted to do that as a kid. Sigh, my parents must have wanted to murder Roald Dahl for that one.