Cake Pops Friday

I am a fan of Bakerella and her cake pops - bite size cake Popsicles.... So last friday, mimi, me and Megan decided to tested it out. Megan was so keen on the idea that come Friday morning, she crashed into our room at 730am shouting "lets make cake pops, lets make cake pops today!"

Ingredients from Phoon Huat AMK :

Sara Lee Pound cake (ready made cake! No baking!)

Creamy vanilla frosting (not available so we have to make from scratch)

Candy Melts

Candy coloring

Lollipop sticks

Sprinklers (kids simply love them)

Let's get it straight. Me and mimi are no baker. I am making cake pops for Megan to have fun and get her hands dirty. Mimi is invited to join so that while I goggle what went wrong, she can continue the process with her grand daughter.

First make the frosting - WikiHow says to mix 11/2 cups of sugar with 1/2 cups of butter, 2 table spoon of cream and a few drops of vanilla essence together.

Beat mixture until a peak forms... end result should be totally different from what Megan is demonstrating in the picture here. 

The process of making cake pops is far longer and complicated than I envision - in hindsight, maybe not a great idea for an impatient kid. But then as long as you can bear through a hundred "are we ready to make the next step yet?', "is the butter soft yet?", you are fine. So I am glad I cheat through the actual baking process and opt for Sara Lee pound cake. 

Crumble the Sara Lee cake into tiny crumbs and add the frosting to the disintegrated cake. 

Mix them together to form a paste so that the cake mixture can bind together when you roll them into balls. Be warned not to add too much frosting or the mixture will be so wet that they will fall off the lollipop sticks! 

Megan has rolled enough plasticine balls to do a great job... then comes my mum whose hand rolled balls made ours look like crap...

Stick lollipop sticks into the balls. But first, dip the end of the sticks into melted candy chocolate before poking them to ensure they stick to the cake balls. Child labor is perfect for this job as they take it very seriously. 

Cake pops need to harden in the freezer before you can coat them in melted chocolate. In the mean time, prepare the sprinklers and chocolate bits. Watch your little one as a proportion of these sweets will go missing before you even started. 

This is the part where everything gets a bit messy. Kid's attention is divided between eating the ingredients and adding the finishing touches which means they are not fast enough for the harden coating. It has been a few hours of hard work and they are tired and has grown cranky. Because this is also the most interesting part, they refuse help from anyone but want to finish every pop themselves!

Fat and satisfied. Now comes the best part.... Give the cake pops away!!! You seriously do not want your kid to go on days of sugar high.....

Activities for the 3 yr old part 3

I want to play with mummy all day long... everyday...

People always say Megan will have my genes for art. Hearing that is kinda stressful.What if, just what of she does not like to paint. At this moment, she is more interested in mixing colors - red and blue become purple, blue and yellow become green, white and red become pink etc.... I once dismissed her question on mixing two colors and told her the result will be maroon. She ended up mixing and showing me different shades the whole evening asking me if "that" is maroon.... And of coz, eventually got angry with me because she will never get maroon. 

We were walking home from the playground some time ago when it suddenly it rained, bringing down a lot of frangipani from the trees. We picked a few home and I urged her to draw the flowers with me. One thing I learned being a parent is that kids do not develop interest by themselves. To get Megan to sit patiently and draw, I have to paint first.

Of coz, we can only guide. Kids being kids will still do it their way. Megan stuck the flowers on her paper and drew me and her walking under a park of tall frangipani flowers. 

Megan spent half of her time at my in laws place. Since I am not sure what she will be doing, I actually drew up a lot of maze games and simple maths worksheets for her to pass her time. Yes I am a KS Singaporean mum. 

Variation to painting : painting 2D Easter eggs! 

Using paper cut outs to create a picture! 

Learning to make origami planes and animals together......I also made paper boats of various sizes in which I wrote the words 大中小...  well since you want to do it, might as well go a step further right? 

Puzzles are a great way to pass time. Diaso sells a set of 2 for $2! 

Reading is the best activity. I realise that many books are not suitable for beginners. It is too expensive to buy then realise the content or the sentence structure do not work well for your kid. The national library is your best friend. It is amazing how much books they stock! But do remember to return them on time because we never did. Megan is a book hogger. 

Megan has been wishing for a playdoh set for months but I cannot convince myself to spend the money. But then, lets not forget that Megan has a daddy who loves her to the moon... Just look at her smile when daddy finally bought her playdoh in May.

Ok I am not happy with old school plasticine for its color BUT I hate playdoh that flakes into a million pieces!! Urgh... Finally I had enough of both last week and decide to make our own play dough. With youtube screening on my ipad, Megan and me had a grand time mixing flour, salt, oil etc in the living room floor... The results? Spectacular color and texture!!!

It turned out to be one of the best activity that we have done together. Megan creating plasticine from scratch. You want it, you make it... I like the concept. And she decorated her rainbow waffles with beads fallen off her broken abacus.

When I am busy, I will tell Megan to invite her frens over for picnic. 

The great outdoors - 

Having friends who are well informed of various exhibitions around town helps tremendously. Andy told us we have to bring Megan to iLight at the bay and Megan went out of control... simply refused to go home...

The East Coast Park is a great place for families. Tiff recommended longgang fishing which did not appeal to Megan but she loves feeding the fishes though... All in all a great morning...

Scooter skate - one of the latest toys daddy bought! I have to admit, this is a great toy.... zooooomm!

Maldives

I am drunk. Staring into the beautiful emerald ocean, I am intoxicatedly drunk. My eyes burned. The sea is too bright and shimmery.  I do not like its glare but I am trapped. The sea draws my thoughts into its depth that has no beginning or end and I am engulfed and helpless in its presences.

Sitting here, I suddenly feel exhausted. Very very exhausted. Without asking for permission, the ocean begins to take and take. The more it takes, the more I have to give. 

How much thoughts or feelings can a person hold and how much can this ocean drain?

Immense.

There is a stagnant wasteland deep within my soul. Filled with disappointments, deceptive promises and uncertainties. It is a rot that eats me from within, leaving my form deceptively untouched from my suffering.

For months, I have tried to verbalize this emotion. But how does one make sense of nothingness? This crushing sense of futility. Emptiness. Void. I thought of Meiling. Can she understand what I cannot say and put them into words and give me a voice?

Hours and hours on the speedboat. 

Hours and hours staring into the never-ending ocean.

Cyan or turquoise. 

Has the ocean transformed itself? 

Tinted by the filth of my accumulated angst? 

Then diluted and washed away?

Am I now slowly healed? 

Because I now have the words…

Thank you for bringing me here to you. 

More Activities for the 2-3 year old

Thanks for the support and feedback on my first blog of activities for 2-3 years old. Many great suggestions and ideas. Some asked how I have the time to do all these. Well, I got a lot of help. My in-laws looked after Megan, my helper looked after the house, Ken and me looked after learning and playing. NOW for more ideas. 

Stamping

If painting is too tedious, try stamping instead. Luckily for Megan, we bought boxes of stamps from Spain. Now is the time to unleash their power!

If you do not have ready made stamps then go creative with a spoilt potato or the extra cucumber. I don't think they really care about the shapes you carved out, they are just keen on the process.

And, forget about those ultra expensive stamp pads. Just use the same poster color set!

Spelling and Word Recognition
Tried this new game last week and boy it worked. Megan can now spell CAR, CAT and COW. Introduce simple words that consist mostly of alphabets your child already recognised. For Megan, words like BOY and CAR are a great place to start since A,B,C and O are easy so Megan just needs to learn R and Y.

For BOY, I drew a boy and wrote B-O-Y below the image and stuck the card to the wall. Then on individual wooden pegs, I wrote out the alphabets. For the game, Megan had to search through a row of pegs to find the exact three alphabets to match those on the image. She will then re-peg them accordingly onto the card. Its like... hmmm... learning simple words through matching.

However never make the same mistake as me. I wrote "Y" differently on the peg and the card (see above). Such minor differences is very confusing for the kid. Just keep things consistent.

The Toilet Roll Fish
Very excited to introduce the glue stick to Megan. Time for craft work using the trusty toilet roll. This is one of those activities that evolves over time and Megan really got addicted to the toilet roll. "I want to make fish, I want to make fish", she will pester me every weekend. But only the first session (see above) looked anything like a fish. I guess the moment I stop monitoring and helping her, she starts creating from her own imagination, which was great.

For this activity, I gave Megan a tray that has a pack of motif printed paper (S$2), a pack of color paper ($2), two glue sticks (S$1.40), a pair of scissors ($5), a flower puncher(S$2) and a star puncher(S$2). The tray is useful because it keeps all the shreds of paper and punch outs in place. While the supply of toilet rolls never ends, my pack of three glue sticks went dry in less than a month. So just buy a lot of spares. And be warned, this is a messy affair.

                           

These are two spin-offs from Megan's masterpieces. My only involvement was to cut the orange and green shreds and a moon on the paper she supplied and TADA, she finished with both for me to pin up on her board. Great job!

Beading

After attending Megan's nursery orientation recently, the activity of bead treading stuck with me. It is an activity that helps develop kid's hand eye coordination, I went straight home and offered my secret stash of beads to Megan. According to the teachers, hand and eye coordination is important for handwriting development.

"Mummy mummy, I do it" came after I tread the third bead. Megan took over the needle and my job was reduced to tying the knots after she is done. If I try to help, she will nag "Be careful mummy. The needle is SHARP and the hole is SMALL". She has since exhausted all my supply and asked me to buy more.

Writing
Too serious for a two years old you say? Yah... but surprisingly Megan enjoyed it. It reminded me of my SNGS days when I had to learn Higher Chinese. All the adults found it cruel and too difficult for me but I did not recall suffering. I had no basis of comparison between Chinese and Higher Chinese so I just did it and got through. It helped that mimi did not expect good grades (or maybe she did!?).

The writing book that Mimi bought for Megan looked like a boring workbook but Megan kept going back to ask us to write with her. Maybe she loved the novelty, maybe she loved the erasable ink. But how fun or serious you want this activity to be really depends on your attitude because the child will take it as it comes. It did not matter to us if she was tracing triangles or 123, it was merely an activity for her to pass her time. But in this case, she happened to learn writing 123 as well.

Five Stones
Five stones is all about concentration and precision. I love five stones and used to get real competitive with this game. But we are not playing five stones in this way for a 3 year old. Mimi brought giant five stones in a basket to my place one day. This is how we play it.

Game One:
Two teams compete to see who can throw more of their colored stones into the basket. This is really a stupid game for adults but it is not that simple for a kid. It requires concentration and focus!! Another hand eye coordination game.

Game Two:

Create an obstacle course along your vestibule. Place stones at intervals to create an S course for them to run. Penalty points if they touch any stones. Make them jump over two stones at a time. Pick up objects as they go. Whatever... you get my drift. 

Festivals
Festivals are great because they give me something specific to do outdoors. If not for festivals, we will be doing playground times infinity. Megan loves the Lantern Festival. I used to love it too as a kid... Burn all the lanterns. Burn them all!!!!

Sadly, in the name of safety, kids these days play with battery operated lanterns. Despised them but regretfully, Megan also has such. Will do the traditional way next year! Oh but special mention on the Hello Kiddy lantern Nicholas bought for Megan. THAT is cute and all the mothers in the park were exclaiming with jealously. 

Sigh, sometimes I feel Megan is growing up way too fast... We need to play more!