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Chopping and slicing and making cinnamon mountains, veggie skeletons and egg critters @WB Annex

 This group is in love with the slice and dice moves. We set up our own slice and dice table with 3 dicers, 3 cutting boards, and a number of small knives. Little did we know that the slice and dice activity would be as popular (or more) than making the food projects. Thanks to neighbors for loaning us crinkle cutters this week. Pickles, cucumber and celery are so much more interesting if the edge is all crinkly. The pictures tell it all although the scrap crust cinnamon mountains were a real hit.

These are supper easy to make and take care of the bread crusts that so many kids want to throw out.
You need about 2 cups of crusts torn up into little pieces, 1/2 apple grates, about 1/3 cup water and cinnamon sugar for on top. Once we combine the first 3 ingredients we divided the dough into piles for each camper who formed them into a volcano shaped pile. The kids then sprinkled the top with a teaspoon or so of cinnamon sugar mix. We baked them about 15 min at 350.  One of the campers went home and fixed this desert for her family.
The group competed to make the best veggie skeleton then voted on each others and awarded most colorful, most variety and most unique. It was fun to see the skeleton families--including pets. Most of the skeletons didn't make it past judging as we are a hungry group. The egg critters were also fun and didn't last long. I got to take a couple home but from the egg monster with a carrot center to the egg under trees with 4 baby eggs to the bunny egg we had fun with our food.  We used a few cookbooks for kids from the library:  The international cookbook for kids, The kids' multicultural cookbook: food around the world, and a couple of mine including Pizza Art.

For all the pictures:
 Food art camp day 2
Food art camp day 3

Making pizza, rice salads, and painted cookies at Food art mini-camp @WB Annex

We started the week with a discussion of  kitchen safety and what would make food look better we started by making chef's hats. Of course several of the hats fell over the kids' faces which just made everyone laugh. We quickly whipped out pizza dough from a packet and formed it into themed personal pizzas. The kids put on lots of veggies and lots of cheese. Got to grate their own and even used my revolving grater.  The themes were the beach, a forest and the park.

Our next project was to make a rice and veggie dish to go with our theme. The kids got to cut, chop and disect cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, celery, and onions to decorate the rice. What was called for was more color and they hit my food color to make blue water and greener trees. wow what colorful stuff. They were concerned that the blue rice would taste funny (it does not) We finished off painting sugar cookies with gels made from Karo syrup. The cookies went really fast.  More pictures are on FB at: Food mini-camp day 1

Big Paper painting caps off 1st week of art camp

This has been a popular project each time we have attempted it as the large size surface seems to release the artistic urges in nearly everyone. We began the day reviewing artwork from some of the masters- Monet and van Gough as well as a number of current artists from modern to traditional. The group is well divided on what they like and what they do not like. They appreciated colorful but not if the design was something "weird." We were able to get the large newsprint pages and tape them to the walls. Students shared pallets, but drew their own designs and then created them. You can see their painted aprons in these pictures too. Some were very traditional others modern. A few are destined to be Father's day presents.

We completed the day with a couple of shorter projects that incorporated color and textures. We created rainbow cupcakes and cookies by mixing the colors of cupcake batter and layering them into the cups. We then painted the cookies using Karo syrup that we tinted with food coloring. Fun and very messy! Oh, and by the way--we ate the whole project!http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-rainbow-cupcakes/


Lastly we did a dandelion picture. some of the group created the backgounds using several colors on foam brushes. We added texture paste on pallete knives for leaves and stems then used finger pouncer balls to create the flowers. Some of the students got a little wild and pounced everywhere but most are identifiable.