Ancient Egypt Unit Study: Sugar Cube Pyramids

Shopping for sugar cubes involved a trade-off, unfortunately. I sacrificed the perfectly uniform shapes that more realistically depict the engineering of the Ancient Egyptians for these brown sugar cubes that more realistically depict the color of the sand blocks that they used:

Unfortunately, these brown sugar cubes don't have good regular edges, and since we were "between" kitchens during this project (we've since finally kicked the workers out of the mostly finished kitchen, choosing to suffice with plywood nailed to the tops of our cabinets and partly unpainted walls until we can do the work ourselves rather than just flat-out run out of money, which is what we were heading towards, sigh) I couldn't mix up a batch of royal icing to use as mortar. I therefore don't think, then, that this particular project achieved a good model of the engineering of an Ancient Egyptian pyramid.

Ask me if the kids care:

The girls had a fabulous time building with their little sugar cube building blocks, and were quite proud of their ungainly, tumble-down sugar cube constructions:

Of course, what kind of momma would I be if I didn't create along with them?

I hid these sugar cubes away until a day in the near future when I feel like mixing up royal icing and trying the pyramids again, and they'll also be perfect with our Halloween candy houses and Christmas gingerbread houses. I'm still on the lookout for uniform brown sugar cubes, but at least where we live, packages of sugar cubes in grocery stores seem to have mostly gone the way of the dinosaur.

Or should I say the Ancient Egyptian pyramid?