Homeschool History/Culinary Arts: Homemade Chocolate

The teenager's Honors World History: Ancient Times study (2 semesters; 2 high school credits) is a LOT of work, because we're using two college textbooks as the spine for this DIY course:

• Duiker's World History
• Gardner's Art through the Ages

This homemade chocolate project is relevant to Duiker Chapter 6, "The New World," and Gardner Chapter 14, "From Alaska to the Andes: The Arts of Ancient America." It also builds context with our study of Mesoamerica, and trip to the Yucatan Peninsula, from two years ago. We discussed the Ancient Maya's relationship to chocolate then--our local university's art museum actually has a Maya vessel that still has the dregs of ancient hot chocolate inside!--but we didn't do any hands-on chocolate-making projects during that particular study.

Yay, because it gives us something new to do this year!

This TED-Ed video about the history of chocolate is surprisingly thorough for being less than five minutes long, and since our study of chocolate is mostly contained to the Ancient Maya, it builds context by centering chocolate within world history:

If you'd rather your student read than watch, here's about the same level of content as informational text from the Exploratorium.

For our hands-on project, I bought this Make Your Own Chocolate kit from Glee Gum--the kids and I have actually done this exact same kit before, but since it was a whopping ELEVEN YEARS AGO(?!?!), I figured we might as well give it another go!

The kit is marketed to and suitable for young kids like my own long-ago wee ones, but it's actually quite suitable for this nearly-grown teenager and fully-grown me, as well--as long as you're a beginner chocolatier, I suppose. If you can temper chocolate in your sleep this kit probably wouldn't cover much new ground for you, but the teenager and I didn't find the instructions or the activity babyish or overly simplified. 

And look! We got to taste real cacao beans!

The kit is sort of like a Hello Fresh for chocolate-making, in that it provides the ingredients in the amounts needed, and then you heat and combine them as directed. I especially liked the sticker thermometer for easily taking the temperature of the chocolate. My teenager was more than capable of completing the entire project independently, so all I had to do was hang out, take photos, add weird mix-ins to the candy wrappers, and then enjoy all of the chocolate!

For mix-ins, we tried various combinations of candied ginger, dried unsweetened cherries, and peanut butter. The latter two in the same truffle was my favorite combo.

If you wanted to extend this activity even further, there are a ton of ways you could go:

If you live within driving distance, Hershey's Chocolate World in Hershey, Pennsylvania, would be a fun, educational-ish trip. They mostly want to sell you things, but if you're thoughtful, you can make the things that they sell you work as enrichment. We didn't visit The Hershey Story on our own trip, but it looks much more legitimately educational, ahem.

If your kid gets really into the foodcrafting part of the experience, you can buy more of the same ingredients from the kit and make more chocolate from scratch. Kid-made homemade truffles or chocolate bars would be such a lovely Valentine's Day project or handmade gift!

Another super fun but low-effort chocolate crafting project is coating random foods in chocolate. Chocolate-covered gummy bears ARE surprisingly delicious, as are sour gummy worms, mint leaves, and, um... Ramen noodles.

If you're working with a young kid, and don't want to mess around too much with molten chocolate, you could make them a batch of edible chocolate slime for a fun sensory extension activity. Or make modeling chocolate, which sculpts well and is also delicious!

Here are some books that pair well with making your own chocolate:

• The Bitter Side of Sweet. Pair this with any chocolate study to bring insight and empathy to the serious problem of child enslavement that plagues modern chocolate production. 
• The Book of Chocolate. This is a very readable history for apt middle grades and up. 
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It's not for the history buff, ahem, but it's perfect if you're doing the kit just to have fun with candy. If you've never read this book aloud to your kids, are you even a homeschooler?
• Chocolate Fever. Yes, it's a children's book, but it's really, really good! Find an audiobook version that you can listen to while you do some of this food crafting, and you can probably get through the entire book in one session.
• Making Chocolate: From Beans to Bar to S'more. This book is a completely excessive tome about making chocolate from scratch, but if you've got an older kid who's interested... well, you're homeschoolers for a reason!

P.S. Want to know more about all the weird math I have my kids do, as well as our other wanderings and wonderings? Check out my Facebook page!

How My High School Girl Scout Troop Earned the (*cough, cough* unofficial *cough*) Harvest Badge

Yes, we made up another Girl Scout badge.

I'm telling you, though, that if you've got a troop of older kids, especially Seniors and Ambassadors like I do, and you're not letting them make up badges, then you're sleeping on some of the best girl-led experiential learning that Girl Scouts offers!

Because if you've got a troop of older kids, I know you know that the official GSUSA badge offerings for those age groups suuuuucks. I'd way rather have a bunch of happy and engaged kids flouting the Girl Scout Badge Police than I would a bunch of bored kids reluctantly working through that same dang Robotics badge for the umpteenth time (Seriously, GSUSA? Three Robotics badges per level? At EVERY level?!? And they're all pretty much the same?!? Please hire me to revamp your badges I will do such an awesome job I swear). 

Anyway... during last Spring's budget/planning meeting my Girl Scouts got super revved up about this cute Harvest badge design--

--and decided that they wanted to earn it this autumn. And so we did!

The kids decided on most of the activities, and I fine-tuned them and sneaked in a few more educational bits. Our local council is also offering an Apple Quest fun patch this season (similar to the one I listed here), so I also bought those and we added in some more apple-themed activities to our plans.

Here are our activities!

Research apple varieties; taste-test apples.

For our apple pie meeting, each Girl Scout was asked to bring approximately five pounds of one apple variety, a small serving plate, and an informational label that they'd researched and created for that variety. 

At the start of the meeting, every Girl Scout sliced one of her apples (giving me a good chance to observe and make sure that they all had appropriate knife skills for our upcoming tasks) and displayed it on its serving plate, then we went around the room and each Girl Scout spoke about her apple variety while we all tasted it. Every apple variety was purposefully bred, so it was interesting to hear what characteristics each variety was supposedly bred for--and if we agreed! The kids also quickly noticed that the apple varieties browned differently, so that was interesting, too.

Make apple pie filling; make homemade pie crust; bake an apple pie; learn to decorate a pie.

As you can tell from the heading, this step accomplished a few of the required activities for the Harvest badge and the Apple Quest fun patch. The Girl Scouts were most excited about baking a pie and decorating it, and since apple pie filling is dead simple and my teenager knows exactly how to make homemade pie crust, I figured that baking an apple pie from scratch was juuuust about doable as a Girl Scout meeting.

And it just about was!

Here's what I asked each Girl Scout to bring:

• approximately five pounds of any variety of apple
• sharp knife
• cutting board
• mixing bowl
• oven mitt
• rolling pin
• measuring spoons and cups
• hair tie or bandana

A couple of the cleverest kids (or the kids with the cleverest parents!) also brought a vegetable peeler and/or a cutting/coring thingy and a dish towel. I attempted to teach everyone how to easily peel and core an apple with just a paring knife, but this did NOT go over well--the kids hated the very idea of it, and they traded around the peelers and corers instead. Kids these days!

I used troop funds to buy all the pie crust and the rest of the apple filling ingredients, as well as aluminum foil, plastic wrap, aluminum pie tins, a 12-pack of Mason jars, and several prepared pie crusts.

After everyone had taste-tested the apples, my teenager taught the rest of the Girl Scouts how to make pie crust from scratch, while my co-leader and I assisted. It was a process, but everyone did create a pie crust! 

The kids wrapped their pie crusts in plastic wrap and put them in the refrigerator to chill while I taught everyone the dead simple process of making fresh apple pie filling from scratch. I encouraged the kids to use a variety of apples, relying on their taste-testing to help them choose, and to taste the filling as they went to make sure that it was to their preference. We might have a picky eater or two in the troop, ahem...

When the pie filling was ready, the kids took their pie crusts out of the refrigerator and learned how to roll them out and put them in the disposable pie tins I'd bought. They added the filling, then rolled out their top crust and decided how they wanted to put it on. When planning this meeting, the kids had been interested in learning how to decorate their pies and make cute pie crusts, so I showed them several inspo images from Pie Style, but everyone ultimately decided to make a lattice top, which was a new skill for most.

Then the kids crimped the edges, wrapped their pies VERY well in plastic wrap... and put them back in the refrigerator to take home. We did NOT have enough room to be baking five whole pies at once!

Instead, I brought out the prepared pie crusts and the kids used those, along with any remaining apple pie filling, to make hand pies and/or muffin tin pies. I think they might have liked that activity the best, because they baked quickly and then the kids could eat them!

Learn strategies to use up surplus apples.

Food waste is one of my personal issues (and the troop has those pesky picky eaters!), so it was important to me to show the kids some ways to preserve or prepare apples that you don't feel like eating out of hand or in a pie.

Both applesauce and apple juice are the easiest thing in the world to make, so I had both my giant stock pot and my very old juicer (it was a wedding gift!) out, and at the start of the meeting, since applesauce does take some time, I asked the kids which they'd rather make. They agreed on juice, so at the very end of the meeting, after each kid had cleaned up but before she left, she got to juice herself a pint jar's worth of apple juice to take home with her. This was a new experience for almost everyone, and I think they all really liked it! 

And, of course, the most important strategy to use up apples: while the kids worked, they threw all of their peels, cores, and scraps into a giant bowl in the middle of the table. After we'd cleaned up, I tossed the entire bowl of scraps to the chickens, and they feasted!

Create an apple recipe book.

Since most of those apple pie activities has been to earn the Harvest badge, the kids needed, in my opinion, one more apple-centric activity to completely earn the Apple Quest fun patch, so I made a Shared Google Doc and asked them to each contribute one apple recipe so that we could make a little cookbook.

I'd hoped they'd get super into the project, and at that time we had an upcoming volunteer date at a local food pantry so I also had it in my head that perhaps we could print the recipes into a little booklet for the pantry to hand out during those times when it was swamped with apples, but the kids did not get super into the project, and so we didn't do anything more with it. 

To be honest, I think they were just flat-out sick of apples! But the project did remind me that my favorite cake, Smitten Kitchen's apple cake, exists, and it's just as delicious as I remembered, so as far as I'm concerned the whole thing was a huge success. 

Contribute to a harvest meal for someone in need.

The kids definitely wanted to do a service project as part of this badge, but they dithered a bit over what, exactly, they wanted to do. Also remember that high school kids are VERY busy, and some of these kids were also working on college applications, scholarship applications, Gold Award applications... It is a lot of work to be a high school student these days!

I researched a few opportunities for them to consider, including serving a meal at one of our city's shelters or hosting a food drive for one of the local food pantries. The idea that the kids liked best, though, was volunteering on a specific day to help food pantry patrons choose the components for a Thanksgiving dinner. So the Saturday before Thanksgiving, we went to the food pantry's distribution location and helped fetch and carry and otherwise made ourselves useful. I carried soooo many frozen turkeys!

Make an autumn craft.

The kids wanted to make gnomes, but we kept running out of time to make them. Eventually, when we met to wrap the gifts they had bought for the kid we were sponsoring for Christmas (for the same food pantry as the Thanksgiving project!), I tacked gnome-crafting onto that meeting. 

I actually had almost everything for this gnome project already in my stash, so I just bought a faux fur remnant, rice, and hot glue. The gnomes all turned out sooo cute, with bodies made from one of my partner's old Henleys and hats made from some of my infinite felt stash. 

References and Resources

Here are some other resources I had available during our Harvest badgework:

• The Apple Lover's Cookbook: This book has photos and information about lots of apple varieties, and the recipes are good for Girl Scouts to flip through to see all the yummy possibilities for cooking with apples.
• The Book on Pie: The recipes in this book look DELICIOUS, so it was another book that was fun for Girl Scouts to flip there. There are so many kinds of pie!!!
• Pie Academy: This has good process photos, especially of making the pie crust and making a lattice top. It has several different pie crust recipes, and some unusual recipes for pie fillings (one contains KETCHUP!?!?).
• Pie Camp: This was my main reference book for the pie meeting. I taught the kids McDermott's "20-20-20" method for baking, passed on her tips for preventing a soggy bottom, and demonstrated how to make and use the foil shield that prevents a burned top. We also used her cooking instructions to make the muffin tin pies.
• Pie Squared: These are essentially sheet pan pies, both sweet and savory. This would be a good recipe book if you wanted to serve fresh-baked pie at your Girl Scout troop meeting.
• Pie Style: Even though it was plenty for the troop to learn how to make a lattice pie crust, because decorating pies was something they'd expressed interest in I showed them the photos from this book of faaancy pie decorations. Everyone went "Oooh!," but nobody wanted to give any of the ideas a try just then, ahem...

Overall, I think this turned out to be a very successful badge! The kids wanted to do it and helped plan it, everyone learned a new skill, a couple of kids got a chance to practice their leadership by teaching the others specific techniques, we did some community service, and now each kid has some more practical life knowledge in her toolkit. 

Up next: cookie season, including seeing if I can sneak in a cookie badge or two, and travel planning, including me looking for yet another retired or Council's Own travel-focused badge that these well-traveled kids haven't yet earned. 

Hire me to create more travel badge for older kids, GSUSA! I'll do an awesome job!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Homeschool AP US History: American Cake

There's a certain view of history pedagogy that feels that hands-on projects do not belong in history study. When you make a paper model of Jamestown, this view would say, you're learning not about Jamestown, but about making paper models.

In some ways, I do get where this is coming from. Lots of hands-on projects, especially for preschool/early elementary, are garbage. Like, garbage in general, as well as garbage at helping a kid explore history. Hint: anything involving a paper plate or paint chips or a brown paper lunch bag is probably garbage.

But other hands-on projects, I firmly believe, are indispensable, at least in the homeschool environment which is where all of my experience lies. And it's not so much because the craft, itself, is just that amazing--it's the context! When my kids built their paper Jamestown models, we read children's books about Jamestown and looked at images online and talked and talked and talked and talked about Jamestown together. Tiny Jamestown lived in our house for years, and we talked even more about it whenever the kids brought it out for their small-world play. When the kids created World War II propaganda posters, we read about propaganda posters and looked at images of propaganda posters online and talked and talked and talked and talked about propaganda posters together. Printed copies of their hilarious propaganda posters lived on the walls, and were subjects of family inside jokes, for years. 

So, yeah. If I just told the teenager to make a cake, a modern replica of a popular cake from the 1700s, for an AP US History enrichment project, that wouldn't be very educational. It certainly wouldn't be AP-level rigorous.

Instead, with an eye to building context, it was a family event that kept us up until midnight but built valuable historical and cross-curricular connections for the teenager. 

And it resulted in what is our new favorite family cake!

American Cake tells the history of the US, and the history of cooking, AND the history of food production, through cakes. Throughout the course of the book, you follow the evolution of ingredients like butter and eggs and milk from the organic, unpasteurized, produced-at-home product to what it is today. Same with flours, sweeteners, and all the other ingredients we commonly use in cakes. As well, you get a history lesson about the overall time period for each cake, and the specific history involved with its creation and consumption.

The cake that the teenager chose to make on this night, for instance, is the Fraunces Tavern Carrot Tea Cake. Fraunces Tavern, in New York City, is where General George Washington hosted a magnificent feast on British Evacuation Day, and this was one of the cakes on their menu at the time. It's an interesting cake because it includes cooked carrots to add sweetness in concert with the expensive white sugar, and instead of baking soda, which wasn't available then, you have to cream the crap out of the butter and sugar, whipping enough air in that it'll expand in the hot oven and make your cake rise a bit.

While the teenager made the cake, Matt and I served as her sous chefs, and we all used the time to talk about George Washington and the Revolutionary War. The teenager remembers, a little, our trip to Fort Necessity one autumn, which, along with our other side trips to Valley Forge, the Delaware River crossing site, and Mount Vernon, make a fairly decent timeline of Washington's life and career. Fort Necessity and Valley Forge are especially important to helping one remember that Washington was a nepotism baby who got his big break, a surveying job (scored without the usual required apprenticeship, because nepotism), from his brother's father-in-law, and Mount Vernon, itself, from his brother, who died young from tuberculosis.

Here's the carrot cake batter, poured into a springform pan that I did not realize we owned:

Another new-to-me appliance: a carrot peeler! I've just been using a paring knife like a jerk, but apparently the teenager has owned a carrot peeler for a decade or so, ever since that year she had a subscription to a children's cooking club that sent her a little kit every month, and this was the first time she decided to let me know about it.

I had never in my life used a carrot peeler before. It is BRILLIANT!

Because we were baking a tavern cake from the time of the Revolutionary War, it seemed appropriate to listen to Revolutionary War-era tavern music while we worked!

And then that reminded me that I should show the teenager the pro-shot Hamilton musical before our Disney+ subscription ends next week, so that's this Sunday's Family Movie Night sorted!

You won't be surprised to learn that without baking soda or baking powder, the cake didn't rise a ton, but still, it was fluffy and moist, even though the teenager and I cut it open piping hot from the oven at the stroke of midnight. We were pretty sure we'd ruin it by doing so, but we could NOT wait until morning to try it, so we cut ourselves fresh pieces, I slathered mine with clotted cream, and we had ourselves a little midnight party.

By the next morning, there was just three-quarters of the cake left, and by that night, all that was left was this:

This cake? Was DELICIOUS! I already love carrot cake, and this is a less-sweet version. It's carrot cake that doesn't give you a headache ten minutes later! Carrot cake, but when you eat it you can actually taste more than just sugar!

Fraunces actually became Washington's steward during his presidency, so it feels safe to assume that his tavern's special cake was probably on the menu at least occasionally. I'm sure the sugar didn't help the terrible state of his teeth, but cake IS pretty soft...

I Made Some Oven Mitts, and I'll Probably Make Some More

 

It was my birthday last week, and the kids and I had made all kinds of plans. The teenager tipped me off on signing up for birthday freebies, so we had some of those to pick up, and we also thought it might be fun to buy iced coffees and hang out for a while at our favorite indie bookstore. For dinner, a local pizza place gives you your age as a discount on your bill on your birthday, and at 47, I feel like I am finally old enough to really work that discount! Afterwards, Matt said he would set up the projector in the family room so we could all eat cheesecake and watch my favorite movie on a super-sized screen.

But first, the kids had to cool their heels for a couple of hours, because I told them that what I REALLY wanted to do the most on my birthday was sew some new oven mitts!

Our current oven mitts were all old and raggedy, which doesn't actually bother me, but Matt kept somehow grabbing pans with the raggediest part of any given oven mitt and burning himself, which is obviously not an oven mitt success story.

So I found this oven mitt pattern from Suzy Quilts, printed it out, and spent part of my birthday happily sewing away!

The exterior pieces are canvas--a couple of years ago, I got into buying canvas remnants whenever I stopped by Joann's, and for a while I was sewing all kinds of stuff with it, but now it's just sitting in my stash and I'm stoked to have a good use for it!--and cotton batting. I bought a TON of cotton batting yardage online during the Covid lockdowns (just between us, I mathed incorrectly and waaaaay overordered, ahem), and after being used on tons and tons of quilts over the past three years it's finally down to a scrappily remnant amount, as well.

The interior pieces are all quilting cotton of unknown provenance and in patterns that I LOATHE, but I keep it around anyway because quilting cotton! So useful! So a couple of these oven mitts have American flag insides, and a couple have pitchfork and straw hat insides, shudder. Don't look inside my oven mitts!

Here's a little of the quilting on the exterior pieces:

These oven mitts sew up SO quickly! I put a few shortcuts into the Suzy Quilts tutorial to make it even quicker, so if you, too, want the absolute quickest way to a new oven mitt, do this:

1. Follow all the regular steps to cut out the pieces, baste the lining to the fabric, quilt the exterior pieces, sew the two interior pieces together and the two exterior pieces together, and turn the exterior side of the mitt right side out.
2. Insert the interior side of the mitt (which should still be inside out) into the exterior mitt. The two parts of the mitt should be wrong sides together.
3. Turn the raw edges of both parts to the inside, clip it well with those super handy plastic clips you finally bought yourself after seeing them on Tiktok and wanting them for years--

--and sew around the edge to finish!

Here's a photo of Luna helping me photograph my brand-new oven mitts on the back deck, right before the kids and I headed off for iced coffee, my free Crumbl cookie, and a couple of hours of book browsing:

These oven mitts have been in use for a week now, and we love them! The two layers of canvas, two layers of quilting cotton, and four layers of cotton batting feel like plenty of insulation, and the size works for every hand from the teenager's to Matt's. Even though I don't think we need more than four oven mitts in our rotation, I'm very tempted to make more while I have the canvas and the cotton batting and a pattern I love at my fingertips. I could save a couple each for these kids' future first apartments, and I could put a few in my handmade presents stash, or just set them aside to replace these when they get worn.

Actually, though, our current hot pads are just as old and raggedy, so maybe I should make some new ones to match my new oven mitts!

The Best Homemade Play Dough Recipe

2011 play dough creation

I don't remember the last time my kids genuinely played with play dough for fun, but I still make this homemade play dough recipe almost every week.

I sell the play dough, undyed or dyed the color of your choice, by the pound in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, but I don't see why you can't simply have the recipe so you can make your own!

2008 play dough creation. I added glitter to the blue one!

The recipe makes about one pound, three ounces of the softest, squishiest play dough you'll ever feel. It's reluctant to dry out, it holds shape well, it's soft enough to feel awesome on your hands but firm enough that playing with it strengthens those little grip and finger muscles, and it dyes like a dream. 

And it takes VERY little time to make! Certainly a LOT less time than it takes to drive to Wal-mart and back for Play Doh!

Another 2011 play dough creation. 

Here are the ingredients you need:

• 1 cup flour. I try to use the cheapest flour I can find for this recipe, usually bleached all-purpose. However, when my kids were tiny and sometimes "needed" play dough right that minute, I used to use whatever flour I had on hand. I've used unbleached flour, wheat flour, and on one personally very sad occasion, organic flour (grr! It's so expensive!), and the play dough always came out great. I know different flours will change the necessary water content, though, so if you're trying for something specific, you'll probably want to experiment a bit.
• 1/2 cup salt. The gold standard for this is, again, the cheapest iodized salt you can find. A couple of times I've run out and used salt with a larger grain, and although it worked, you can definitely see and feel the larger grains in the finished play dough. Cheapo iodized salt, however, will make your play dough as smooth as butter!
• 2 tsp cream of tartar. Cream of tartar aids consistency and stability, so you can skip it if you need to, but the play dough won't be as nice in texture or as long-lived. 
• 1 tbsp oil. Again, any oil works for this recipe, but I like to use the cheapest available. Canola is the cheapest, but if all I have on hand is olive, I'm just as happy with the finished play dough. You'd think that the color of olive oil would affect the tone of the finished white play dough... but it doesn't!
• 1 cup water. 
• dye (optional). If you want to dye your entire batch a single color, dump it into the pot with the rest of the ingredients. Otherwise, knead the dye into the finished play dough. I have tried every dye I can think of, from the cheapest to the nicest store-bought food dyes, homemade and store-bought natural dyes, liquid watercolors, and powdered tempera. For color saturation, my favorite BY FAR is powdered tempera! It will stain your hands while you're kneading it into the play dough but it won't stain your hands while you're playing with it. It also lightens the play dough in a way that feels absolutely magical and wreaks absolute hell on my ability to fit a full pound of play dough into the containers I sell it in. 

Step 1: Add all ingredients to a single pot.

Just dump it all  in!

Step 2: Cook over medium heat, stirring continually. 

This is time-consuming, because you want to cook the play dough low and slow so you don't scorch it, and you have to stir it continuously to keep it from sticking to the pot. I've never timed myself, but I do get through several minutes of a podcast or streaming show while I stir.

When the play dough loses its gummy appearance and wants to ball up, remove it from the heat and remove the play dough from the pot.

Put the pot to soak in the sink before you even try to wash it, because flour + water = glue!

Step 3: Knead until smooth.

When you dump the play dough out onto your work surface, it will look like this:

As soon as it's cool enough to touch, knead it until it looks like this!

Here's the final weight of my finished play dough:

It's ready to play with immediately, and will keep for several weeks in the refrigerator in an airtight container. When my kids were little, I'd toss it when it started looking dirty from their play, but also toss it immediately if it smells rancid or the texture and consistency change for the worse. 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

So Many Cooks in the Kitchen: All the Ways We've Homeschooled with Educational Cooking Projects

King cakes from scratch!

 As I was writing the other day about my kid's experiences with baking throughout her childhood, I got interested in trying to remember what-all we actually had cooked together as part of her homeschool education. 

Spoiler alert: it's been quite a lot!

Projects like these have been such a part of the pattern of our days that I couldn't remember off-hand more than a few notable ones: the cookie map of Ancient Egypt. The cookie Solar System. Mason jar butter. Experimenting with yeast.

Fortunately, THIS is why I've been a blogger for 15-odd years--it's so I don't have to lose my precious memories because of my terrible memory!

I had SO much fun going through my blog archives to find all the times we incorporated a specific cooking project into our homeschool. I didn't count the times that we did stuff solely for fun (even though that's all educational, too!), like our cookie bake-offs and our dyed rainbow waffles and cupcakes, or the food that we made together just as part of life, like yogurt popsicles and applesauce and endless DIY pizzas and quick breads. In this master post, I'm just counting specific projects that we did that were for specific topics of study. I wish I could go back and do them all over again with those magical little kids!

ART

• sculpture: bread sculptures. Bread dough is edible clay! It's also interesting to kids to see the transformation in their sculpture that comes from baking the bread. Of course, bread dough is just one more interesting sculpture medium that all kids should be exposed to, along with all kinds of clays and papier mache and anything combined with a good hot glue gun. You could also incorporate bread sculptures into subjects like math and literacy, sculpting bread dough snakes into shapes and letters and baking them into breadsticks. 

GEOGRAPHY

• Japan: homemade mochi ice cream. Try making your own awesome Japanese treat! Cooking and tasting Japanese cuisine is a great way to build context in a kid who loves anime and manga. If kids are interested, the library usually has kid-friendly cookbooks of Japanese cuisine, and I feel like most places have Japanese restaurants. It's a great segue into a study of Japanese culture. 

• local geography: locavore food prep challenge. Kids learn first-hand about the local food movement and what foods are grown and currently being harvested in their location as they collect ingredients and make a dish consisting entirely of local foods. If kids are really interested in local foods, you can spend spring through fall visiting every u-pick farm in driving distance, and look for places like independent dairies, local breweries, honey farms, and other local food providers who offer tours and workshops. Learning how to preserve those food products is a great next step! You can do also similar cooking challenges anywhere--collect ingredients and make a fun meal at an Asian or Mexican grocery; set a budget for kids to shop for a meal at the grocery store and then cook it independently; find all the Fair Trade items, etc. Even younger kids can play by finding foods with specific colors or something new they want to taste or something that starts with a certain letter, etc.

• New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Venice: king cake. Mardi Gras/Carnival is a great time to dip into a geography unit study of New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, and/or Venice. Not only is there the local cuisine of each area, but also the local music, the costumes, the dances, the parades--so much for every sense! If kids love that kind of thing, there are all kinds of nation- and region-specific holidays you can explore throughout the year to build geography and cultural knowledge. If kids just like baking, you can actually learn quite a lot of American history just through baking cakes!

• map skills: cookie map. This is one of my favorite homeschool projects to do with young children. We've made cookie maps of every place imaginable, from the United States as an Independence Day project to various countries that we've studied to places that illustrate historical events. Kids can use frosting and candies to embellish the map and add features, and can make flag labels out of paper and toothpicks. The possibilities are endless! 

• Taiwan: bubble tea. If your kid is into bubble tea, this could be the first restaurant-quality food that they learn to cook at home, because it's a SUPER accessible recipe. It fits great into a unit study of Taiwan or the entire continent of Asia, or expand the geographic interest by making or tasting special drinks from all over the world while studying those places. Take it in a new direction with more exploration of the mathematics of spheres or the science of polymers. Boba is also another preschool-friendly sensory material, although it's a choking hazard for under-threes. 

HISTORY

• Ancient Mesopotamia: Gingerbread Cuneiform. See what it's like to write cuneiform... and then see how delicious it is to eat it! Other great Ancient Mesopotamia enrichment activities could include building models of a ziggurat or the Temple of Ishtar and listening to The Epic of Gilgamesh. Take the gingerbread cuneiform in a different direction by having a kid use the stylus to draw maps or diagrams or spelling words, or premake a gingerbread moveable alphabet to practice word building.

• Neolithic Great Britain: gingerbread Stonehenge on a cookie cake. Kids get their hands on this Neolithic henge monument by building it in gingerbread on a cookie cake base. This one is mostly just for fun, so it would be a good thing to make as a little celebration when finishing up the relevant unit study. It also almost certainly ties into ancient astronomy, so you have a ready segue into the history of science. Gingerbread is also just a great structural material, so you could have a go at building pretty much any architectural creation with it--how fun would a gingerbread Eiffel Tower or Egyptian Pyramid be for Christmas-time?!?

• Ancient Greece: cookie and Jello map. Here's your assurance from me that your kids' cooking project does not have to look perfect, or even attractive... or even not gross. I think this cookie and Jello map of Ancient Greece that the kids made looks SO gross, but they put a ton of research into it, worked really hard on it, and learned what I wanted them to learn. And they said it was delicious! 

• pioneer studies: Mason jar butter. You'll probably come to this project inspired by reading Little House in the Big Woods or visiting a living history museum. It's an especially good activity when it's miserable outside, because it gets little bodies moving and occupies them for quite a while--and then you can have a snack! Contextualize the activity by visiting a humane dairy farm or getting a 4-H kid to let you milk their cow, or doing other living history projects. It pairs well with the picture book Fry Bread, which also includes a cooking project!

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

• J.R.R. Tolkien: Lord of the Rings feast. Themed dinner and movie nights are my absolute favorite thing! After we read each of the books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy together (Matt has read SO MUCH TOLKIEN out loud in his life!), we had a movie night with a themed dinner to watch the associated film. It's very fun for kids to remember their favorite details from the book and figure out recipes to represent them. Sometimes they like to make foods written about in the book, like seed cakes or rabbit stew, and sometimes they like to make foods that represent other part of the book, like these Ring of Power doughnuts, above. You can make a themed dinner about ANYTHING, and it's always educational for the kids to research what they want to make, shop for the ingredients, and cook it.

• children's books: Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off. The kids thought that Amelia Bedelia was SO FUNNY, and I still remember how absolutely thrilled my kid was when we finished Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off, she turned the page, and found a recipe there for Amelia Bedelia's cake! All praise to that author, because my kid could make the cake right then, using ingredients we already had on hand. Making recipes from children's books is such a great literacy connection. It builds context to the real world, and it makes reading feel even more fun than it already is. We also own and have really liked cooking from the Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook and The Little House Cookbook--any literary cookbook written around a children's book is probably going to have kid-friendly recipes.

   MATHEMATICS

• fractions: Rice Krispy Treat fractions. Make Rice Krispy Treats, pour into a square or round cake pan, then when they're set have a lot of fun cutting them into various fractions. You can use any food that can be set in a round or square pan, but Rice Krispy Treats work particularly well because they cut cleanly without a lot of crumbling. Combine it with all the other hands-on ways that you can explore fractions, because it builds a kid's number sense by seeing the same concept illustrated multiple ways. Rice Krispy Treats are also a good sculpture tool for all kinds of art and model-making projects.

• geometry: heart-shaped cake. Making a heart from a square and circle is a neat little trick--and it's delicious! You can extend the geometry play with paper geometric figures that kids can pattern and make pictures with. If you're feeling really ambitious, you could then bake a cake of whatever picture they've created with their shapes!

• logic: edible chessboard. My kid and I baked this blondie and brownie chessboard during a time when chess was of high interest to her, and it was so fun! There was some good patterning and ordering involved, but things really got wild when we started removing squares from the board and figuring out how to play around them. Kids who like puzzles and games or are at all creative or mathy can get really into chess, and there are a lot of kid-friendly chess enrichment activities around. These two matching brownie and blondie recipes would also lend themselves to even more fraction exploration, patterning, and, if you frost them with letters, moveable alphabet play.

• telling time: clock cake. This is more fun than educational, but it does require practical knowledge of how a clock face is organized and the ability to write the numbers. You could expand this lesson by cutting the cake to demonstrated elapsed time, or instead writing fraction divisions on it. 

PRACTICAL LIFE

• reading comprehension/following directions: Jello. As soon as a kid can read pretty well, I think it's so educational for them (and SO fun for you to watch!) to be given any variety of easy-prep packaged food and encouraged to read the directions and make it all by themselves. Jello is perfect for this because the only cooking required is hot water, and it's very hard to mess up Jello! Instant puddings, canned biscuits and sweet rolls, and boxed cake mixes are also easy enough for a young independent reader to make.

• how it's made: homemade peanut butter. This requires a high-powered blender, but kids find it fascinating to see how easy it is to make their own nut butter. My kid did not prefer this freshly-blended, peanuts-only peanut butter (even though the peanut butter I bought her at the time was also peanuts-only, sigh), but found it VERY fun to blend other delicious things into it. You can blend in honey, maple syrup, jam, and even more creative ingredients like spices and whole fruits. Cinnamon honey peanut butter was DELICIOUS! If a kid gets into the "how it's made" part, they might LOVE the TV show, much of which is free on YouTube. If they get into the blender part, introduce them to making their own smoothies and hummus and other nut butters. Blenders are VERY fun!

SCIENCE

• astronomy: cookie Solar System. This is an all-day or multi-day project, but it is SO MUCH FUN! It requires calculation, geometry, a lot of research, and a lot of problem-solving, but the result is a tasty collection of cookie planets with correct relative size. My kids had a lot of fun reading about each planet so they'd know what color scheme to frost it and how many mini M&M moons to give it. It goes great with any other Solar System activities, many of which are equally hands-on. If you get a good cookie recipe that doesn't spread, you can also bake cookies to represent mathematical concepts like arrays and area models and larger map projects--can you imagine an entire cookie map of the world, with a different cookie for each continent?!?

• cell cycle: states of meiosis cookie models. Reinforce the stages of meiosis by building an edible model. You can turn just about any diagram into a cookie or cake model with enough creativity! Plant and animal cells also lend themselves well to being made of cookies or cake, and I have seen an AWESOME cake model of a World War I trench.

• fungi: yeast bread. The day that my kid learned that yeast is alive is one of my favorite days of homeschooling. She was so interested that we put aside whatever else we'd been planning to do and instead did some experiments with yeast, watched an educational video about fungi, looked at yeast through the microscope... and baked yeast bread! This would be a great intro to all kinds of kid-friendly yeast baking projects, including collecting wild yeast and making sourdough. 

• chemistry: gelling and spherification. Learn how polymers work by creating gelatin juice spheres. Other hands-on ways to explore polymers include making milk plastic and slime. Or continue with edible states of matter by playing with non-Newtonian fluids, densities in liquids, and ice. These taste-safe spheres also make a good sensory material for babies on up! 

• polymers: authentic homemade gummy candies. If you've got a kid who adores gummy candy, don't fall for those DIY kits or tutorials that essentially use just unflavored gelatin and juice or Kool-Aid. They do not taste like authentic gummies, and your kid will not be fooled! You really can make authentic gummies, though, that really do taste awesome, and your kid can get some hands-on experience working with polymers while you're at it! Kids who like this might enjoy other DIY food kits. There are SO many, from growing your own mushrooms and window gardens to making your own cheese and chocolate and gum.

• properties of matter: density cake. This an easy and kid-friendly recipe that kids can run when they're learning about the properties of matter and density. Kids can do some similar experimentation to make a liquid density tower, although that one's not edible. If mix-ins seem to encourage your kids to try new foods, you can expand that into all kinds of bake-offs and cooking play. 

I wish I'd taken better photos of the kids doing all this magical cooking, because I'd love to write a book of educational cooking enrichment projects, but now I don't have anymore mini models! Maybe my teenager could help me with some illustrations to use instead...