Anyhoo, this book is one from the Max and Ruby series (also on tv as an animation in the US, on NickJr). It's a very sweet story about Max and his big sister Ruby making cakes for their grandma's birthday. Ruby makes an angel surprise cake with raspberry fluff icing and Max makes an earthworm cake with red hot marshmallow squirters. The kids had been asking to make these cakes all week. They really wanted to make Ruby's cake and said Max's cake was gross, so we all made a cake together using a box of cake mix. Yeah, Martha Stewart would have an embolism reading this, but the cake mixes are great for preschooler baking. I've got them as cheap as a dollar on sale and the kids drool over the box graphics and photo of the cake, then there's the easy to follow recipe and cooking instructions, WITH PICTURES!!! so it's really easy and fun.
While the cake was cooking the kids played with the many shades of grey and brown playdough that have evolved from all the playdough activities we've been doing recently. They made various reconstructions of Max's earthworm cake with string for worms and cut up bits of these weird red plastic popsicle sticks for the marshmallow squirters. One of my mates gave me a bunch of kid craft gear for my birthday last year and these popsicle sticks were in the bag. They are kind of like corrugated cardboard in structure, but plastic and in different colours. The kids find them really easy to snip up with kiddy scissors, so they worked great for this.
Once the cake was baked I cut it and put jam in the middle, then iced the sides and the kids iced the top and stuck on marshmallows and sprinkles.
Then, while I cooked dinner (no cake before dinner because I am clearly a fascist dictator), the kids played cutting out and colouring "Bunny Money" from Rosemary Wells' website. Looking around there are some good Max and Ruby games and colouring bits on the web. Some on Rosemary's site and some on Nick Jr, including this awesome Max and Ruby dollhouse puppet theatre, which we will have to do soon because the kids will go nuts for it.
After dinner we scoffed some cake and read the book again. Mmmmm cakeface.
Can you think of any other children's books about cooking that you've read that could be adapted to allow kids to reinact the story in the kitchen? No, we're not doing George's Marvelous Medicine! I so wanted to do that as a kid. Sigh, my parents must have wanted to murder Roald Dahl for that one.
I think we had a bit too much paper in the water, because it came up with a very thick sheet that is still drying a day and a half later, but the kids thought it was cool and wanted to do it again, so we made two big sheets. 
We tipped them out onto one of the old bed sheets that we use for painting, so they could dry in the sun.
I left the tub out overnight thinking they would probably want to play with it more the next day. Before we went to play with it again I tried to make them some more normal screens than the giant unweildy laundry sack that took all three of us to use.
I wish it was socially acceptable for me to wear a hunormously mahoosive blue ballerina tutu for the hell of it, whilst going about my day.
We were all very impatient, especially after the giant sheets hadn't dried overnight, so I put a pile of the little princess papers stacked up with felt inbetween in the microwave and that dried them out in five minutes, so the kids could draw on them right away.
Yes, that's right from one toilet roll, all that mess and mayhem later and we had made.... da da daaaaa.... *Pink* toilet roll. I'm going to pretend that I can't hear you laughing at me.
I'm off out into the yard now to strain the rest of the pulpy mess through the laundry sack, so I can mix it with some flour and make some paper clay for them to use tomorrow. I'll let you know if that is just as unfathomably messy.
We got the river to be about an inch deep and the kids floated bottle tops down it for quite some time. I had about 20 different brightly coloured bottle tops saved, but I didn't get photos of that. With there being so much water in the equation, I just took a handful of pics and then put the camera back inside the house. You get the idea though.
It didn't take much really, and that's why I wanted to make a post about it, that and the fact that it's likely to appeal to any girls that might not be into 
Other bits we stuck on were some glittery craft pom pom things that were supposed to be sea urchins and some kiddie craft jewels we had handy to make mermaid kingdom full of treasure.
Thank you also to 
As usual, there are rules and regulations associated with these awards, you know, list 10 things you wish for, list 15 things you want to do, list 20 other blogs, list any vegetables you ate this week, list any objects you have in your pockets, list any dairy, plant or animal products that you intend to bring into the country. I'm afraid I'm shirking those responsibilities. Naughty!
First of all I cut out the craft foam into two sides of a duck shape, with two wings and two feet.
The kids set about colouring these while I put together the structure of the toy with an exacto knife and a glue gun.
I've made a copy of the duck shapes that I drew in case anyone wants to make one too. Just click on the thumbnail below and save the full resolution jpg. It's US letter sized, so if you're printing A4 then select "fit to page" when printing, or you'll have bits cropped off.
Here are the duck pieces after the kids had coloured them in. Great by the way if you have two kids, because each kid gets an identical body, wing and foot to colour, so no fighting!
Then all I had to do was glue on the ducky decoration and it was ready for action! The feet were glued at right angles to the circumference of the wheel and they were placed on opposite sides of each wheel (6 o'clock and 12 o'clock), so they moved in a right, left, right, left stepping motion.
Here's a quick vid showing the flippy floppy action of the feet.
By the way, it makes eating spaghetti much easier for the wee ones too, because they can skewer the hot dog bit and of course all the spaghetti comes with it.
We'll have to try it with mushrooms, peppers and courgettes to see if they work too.
Here's a close up of one side of the alteration. I tied the adult length straps in a knot and sewed them down out of the way to make them fit the kids.
Not bad for $2! It only took a couple of hours in the evening to do and I didn't have to cut any of the dress, so in reality, when they grow out of it I could resize it for them if they still want to wear it. I suspect I'm going to have to turn the air blue shouting at my sewing machine to get the other dresses made, because I want to get more than one kid dress out of each of the two adult dresses. We shall see.
We decided to name it after the station near where the grandparents live, that we visited on our vacation last month. It's a place in Snowdonia in North Wales where you can ride on a narrow gauge railway that was once used in the slate mining industry years ago. The kids were so excited that the train that pulled us was painted blue and called "Thomas Bach", which means "Little Thomas" in Welsh. The place is called Llanberis, and here are a couple of pics of the real station there (nothing like the cardboard one we made mind you)
I am embarrassed to say that when writing the name on the cardboard station with a sharpie, I didn't check the spelling first and managed to put an extra R in there. Bah! Never mind. My spelling and grammar are be carp. 
My oldest daughter, who is four did most of the colouring, but my younger daughter, who is three had a scribble on one of the sides too. They managed to get four tracks going into the station with our mismatched collection of Ikea wooden tracks and Daiso wooden tracks.
I don't know how long it'll last, but when we're done it'll just go back in the recycling and we can make another freebie station from more boxes, with a different design.
I stuck them all together and cut bits off to kind of make them a bit of an island shape. Then I cut a hole in the pizza box to sink a pyrex dish into (will be a lake/pond eventually)
After the shape was kind of ok I packed it out a bit with crumpled up newspaper and then covered it all in aluminium foil, because that way we can pull off the playdough easily when the fun is over and reuse it yet again.
The kids spent probably an hour sticking playdough on this island shape. Same playdough that we used for the train table on Wednesday. The kids were two four year olds, one three year old and one 18 month old. I was surprised that considering the ages of the kids, it still came out looking pretty respectable. I had to manage the build process by pulling out one colour of playdough at a time and then they took peices, rolled them flat with mini rolling pins, or just squishing them with their palms, then sticking the flat pieces to the island.
The plastic funnel that was used for the volcano on the train table was added to the top of the island, because every dinosaur island needs the props for an extinction event (not willing to play meteors in my kitchen I'm afraid, so super volcano it is) The lava was some old plasticine that we had lurking in the craft bin.
Once we had all the playdough on, I brought out all the toy dinosaurs and the bits and bobs of pretend plants, like lego trees and flowers and one lonely plastic palm tree. The island still looked a bit sparce, so we went out in the garden and pillaged a load of greenery and rocks to add to it. 
Lots of dinosaur splashing and roaring ensued. Awesome game of which dinosaurs eat which other dinosaurs too. I was surprised that they were able to pick out the carnivores and herbivores from our play dinos pretty easily and to make us look even healthier, the king of the dinosaurs (the giant t-rex) was a happy meal toy. Oh the shame.
The idea was to make our own temporary train table on the kitchen table, using some cheap plastic tracks from 
Then the kids set up a construction site with toy diggers, lego construction workers (that were mine when I was a kid) and random wooden bits of pretend building stuff.
Then they worked on making a beach and ocean, with a rock and lighthouse to keep the one ship that we had safe.
After that they moved on to creating a lake and a volcanic island on the other side of the table. 
Finally, I broke out a few of the 
They stuck glass nuggets onto the lake because they said it was frozen. Someone accidentally wrote off a car in the volcano, which made me giggle.
Right at the end they decided that they needed a house, so made one out of some more of my childhood lego that my mum was awesome enough to save.
Other random stuff we stuck in the playdough included a couple of tunnels for the trains, some lego flowers and trees, some rocks from the beach and some green craft pom poms for bushes. Here are probably too many pictures of the fun we had...
Our garden is distinctly lacking in the flora department, but if I had lots of flowers and foliage out there then I'd have got them to stick some real greenary in the feilds. One word of warning: If you attempt this with wooden train tracks I'd be prepared to have to scrub off the playdough afterwards. I once used playdough to hold a wooden train track bridge together and it stuck to it like boogers to a preschooler's tshirt. Not cool. 
They decorated some cheap white pillowcases...
We made sparkly magnetic fridge puzzles of each kid's name from sheets of Crayola printable magnets that I came across in Goodwill.
Lastly, and this is still a work in progress, using the same method that we used for the cushion craft, I tape squares of old bed sheet to cardboard and let them draw away and then save them, because I'm going to use the artwork to make a quilt or throw for them in the future. Here are a couple of my three year old's pieces from a few months back
and here are the wonderfully colourful drawings that my four year old has done for her quilt. Hopefully it'll be a nice keepsake showing how the style of drawings changes as they get older.
We've not had any real problems with markers being drawn on things that they aren't supposed to be yet. They come off skin pretty easily if you wipe it quickly. I guess the main danger is getting it on clothing, but experimental self decoration has only ever been an issue with the kids under three and a half really, and I tend to make sure they are wearing grotty old tshirts for crafting in anyway. We're lucky that our table top is tiled and so the markers come off that with a bit of elbow grease. Sometimes we use them outdoors in the yard too, this helps with ventilation, because when I've got more than a couple of kids using markers I have the windows open to keep the air fresh.
I had a yellow dollar store square plastic bucket with handles that was used for the main part of his body and everything else was hot glued on and painted with either yellow or grey paint. Here's a few pics of him being put together and the kids painting bits...
The front of his body was made from half of the plastic container that held Safeway susan cookies. PSA: Never buy safeway susan cookies if you have long term plans to fit in the trousers you own. It's impossible to eat less than, oh I don't know, twelve pounds of them in one sitting.
His caterpillar tracks were made from some corrugated cardboard from random boxes and round things like empty tape rolls and empty single serving pots of apple sauce and a couple of bottle lids.
I cut a square hole in the susan cookie lid, so that I could make his front open up like in the movie and the kids can keep stuff/hide stuff in his body. I'd love to find the time to sew them a little felt boot with a fake plant in it, just like in the movie.
He's a cutie, and the great thing with this was that because Wall-e is a battered old robot, you don't have to be too careful about how you slap him together. The messier he is, the more like the real Wall-e he will look ;). I have no idea what to do now if they ask for EVE to go with him. I fear that she's a bit too slick to pull off with random junk from the recycling bin. Maybe papier mache?
Anyhooo, we're playing with the contents of the recycling bin again, so can you guess what we're going to be making out of this pile of junk? Well, it's not all junk. That yellow plastic tub is from the dollar store, but the rest of it is random nonsense out of our recycling bin.
I'll post up the project as soon as we're done. Probably Sunday.
This shows the method for turning the folded boat inside out to finish it. Fold out one end of the boat and then turn it around and fold out the other end. Once it's turned inside out like this, it's a rather sturdy boat. You have to be careful not to either rip the outer edge of the boat or the pointed ends, so just turn it out slowly and it should be fine.
Once you can make the bigger ones then it's easy to make smaller ones too.
You can make them out of wax paper or tin foil too and they are good for a bit of bath time fun, or paddling pool, or on a lake. Despite being paper they hold up pretty well as long as you don't dunk them.
I really like ones like 
and here it is after...
Train cake for my daughter and her best freind who had a joint party that year. That was painted white chocolate icing again. 
The Angelina Ballerina one was baked in a disposable roasting tray from Safeway. The icing was cream cheese this time with the decoration piped onto it (I sketched it out on the cream cheese with a BBQ skewer before having at it with the black piped icing just to be sure it would fit)
The Gruffalo cake was the trickiest I guess, because I made the spikes on his back and his orange eyes from marzipan, but decorating this still only took about two hours/two and a half hours total late in the evening. The background was cream cheese icing that I coloured blue, green and yellow before spreading on and then I piped on the gruffalo on top with chocolate icing. "
Pirate-superhero-mermaid cake, which was made up of four trays of brownies and cream cheese icing. The superman logos around the side are party favour rings that I smooshed in, so the kids could lick the icing off and keep them. The mermaids are just polly pockets rammed into the cake up to their waists and then tails piped on with icing. The island in the middle was some stacked up pancakes with jam holding them together (weird I know, but it worked).
I never shell out for cake boards either. I just cut corrugated cardboard from in between the pallets at costco and put one layer over the other at right angles to give the corrugation strength in both directions and then cover it in aluminium foil or plasticy wrapping paper for moisture proofing (just make sure it fits in your fridge. Yeah, I made that mistake once). 
(maimed birthday girl) + (medical glue) + (job loss) +(visa fiasco) + (emergency house moving) = lame week.
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