Peanuts and cake!

To finish up our study of peanuts we talked about G.W. Carver and created a mobile with facts about him. Then we made peanut people!

It was a hoot watching the kids make the different characters. Gman really got into this project. He made a huge amount of them and then asked for a baggie to store them. I was so excited to see him do some imaginative play with the characters.

Later in the afternoon G and I picked raspberries. We got a lot of mosquito bites but a lot of berries. He gave out kinda quickly so we stopped when had about half a cup. Which was just enough to make cake!

I found a recipe on the internet (although I'm not sure where now!) and we modified it for our small amount of berries. Here's the recipe:

1 3/4 C flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 C white sugar
1 C raspberries
1 teaspoon baking soda dissolved in 1/2 cup milk (we used almond milk and it didn't dissolve, but the cake seemed ok!)
2 eggs, slightly beaten
3/4 C shortening (we used butter flavored)
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Mix together flour, salt, sugar and cinnamon. Cut in shortening. Next add soda + milk, eggs, and raspberries. Pour into a greased pan and bake at 325 for 1 hour.

We did half the recipe in a small loaf pan in my toaster oven since I refused to heat the house when we don't have AC!

Next we made a dairy free icing with confectioners sugar, more shortening (I know I know! Yowsa!), cocoa, almond milk and vanilla. I did it till it looks right, which I know doesn't help you guys, but there are lots of icing recipes on the web. G picked chocolate icing and asked to ice the cake.

Very well done for a first attempt.

He is so very proud of this cake. And it turned out pretty good although it's sweet enough on it's own to really not need icing. The raspberries were less than an hour old and so very sweet and wonderful.

In fact, even picky older sister said the cake was great once she removed the icing. She has never liked overly sweet things and this icing is pretty over the top. She also usually hates raspberries but said they were good in the cake.

Now she's asking to make lemon cake and he's already onto the next thing: How are maps made? Time for mama to study and come up with a lesson!