Breakfast for Dinner and a Hot Melty Mess!

Okay, to start the kids off with the right impression of this whole “trying new recipes” concept, we kicked it off with a bang – Cake Batter Pancakes!  I mean, are you kidding me?!?  Taking cake batter with icing and calling it a pancake, seriously, why didn’t I think of this before?!? 

Kennedy doesn’t really like pancakes, but when I explained the ingredients and showed her the Pinterest picture, she was soooo on board!

We had all the ingredients that we needed, except the yellow cake mix, so Jerry ran out really quickly to grab some while we started our craft (but, I will get to that in a minute).

So these were super easy, all you need is:

• 1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
• 1 cup Betty Crocker Supermoist yellow cake mix
• 1 Tablespoon sugar
• 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
• pinch of salt
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1-2 cups milk
• assorted sprinkles
• For the Glaze:
• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 1 Tablespoon milk
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• assorted sprinkles
• 2 Tablespoons butter, softened

Combine flour, cake mix, baking powder, sugar and salt in a bowl and mix.

Add 1 cup of milk, eggs, and vanilla extract. Stir until smooth. Add additional milk until batter has the consistency of pancake batter. You can also add more cake mix if you want your pancakes to have a stronger cake batter flavor.

Preheat a skillet to low to medium heat. Fold desired amount of sprinkles into batter. Pour batter in 1/4 cup measurements onto skillet and let cook until bubbles form on top, about 2-3 minutes. Flip and cook for 1 minute more. Serve with vanilla glaze (recipe follows).

For vanilla glaze: mix powdered sugar, butter, and vanilla and milk until glaze forms. You may need to add a little more milk to reach desired consistency so that it can be drizzled. Mix into glaze and drizzle on pancakes.

          

OMIGOD, they smelled like heaven, actually more like waffle cones, but close enough!

One problem, the glaze was not very good. 😦  I followed the directions exactly, but I didn’t try it before dishing it out to the kids, since I am juice dieting it before our Mexico trip.  Bad idea.  Jerry, Kole and Kennedy and even Kinlee all LOVED the pancakes, but the glaze, not so much.  So, I would recommend either playing with that recipe, or just use syrup on them for some smiley faces!  Everyone agreed they are worth making again, but without the “yucky” icing.  Kinlee did not have the icing and ate hers all up!

     

Craft time!  So tonight, we decided to make multi-colored crayons.  This was suuuuper easy and the kids got a huge kick out of it!  We had a bucket full of old crayons that they refuse to color with because some are broken and they aren’t sharp, blah, blah blah.  So we took some of those crayons and recycled them into new “cool” crayons that Kennedy wants to take and show off at school!

Here are the steps we followed for the easiest family fun project EVER!

1) pick out some crayons and take all of the paper off of each one.  (My kids did almost quit here, because taking the paper off “is just too hard.”)

         

2) Then using a sharp knife and cutting board, cut the crayons into small pieces. (The crayons tended to fly around the kitchen a bit while I was cutting, which the kids found extremely amusing, but I am sure you all are much better with a knife than I am!)

3)  Add the pieces to an oven safe baking dish.  I didn’t have any fun shaped pans, so I just used a mini muffin tin.  The kids were totally okay with circle crayons!  (I greased the tins with some Pam, I don’t know if that was necessary or not, but we did it. )  We didn’t have a “recipe” per se to follow, so we just added pieces until the tins were about half full.

    

4)  We baked them for at 230 degrees for about 17 minutes.  When they came out, they were a hot waxy mess!

5)  I let them cool for about 30 minutes and took them out of the tin (and by took them out, I turned the pan upside down and beat the back of it, then beat the pan against the counter and then beat the back of it some more…it took a few minutes, but they came out and the pan was not harmed in any way!)

When they were finished, the kids divied them up.  The selection process was full of “Oh man, I was going to pick that one next!”  They had a great time.

This first Picky Pack Pinterest Party was a success!  The food was yummy, the craft was fun and we spent some good technology free time together!  What more can I ask for…now to develop a point system and plan tomorrow’s fun!!