Monkeying around.

When my cute, sweet, innocent monkeys asked me to help them with  baking their school projects I said yes of course. What cooking enthusiastic mother wouldn’t? Boy, little did I know that just this once  I should have declined and gone to the grocery store for what they needed. My brain should have done the simple math: clean kitchen + monkeys x (ingredients)2+ camera = monkeymess! Monkeymess. My new word for messy, goofiness created by a Monkey One and Monkey Two collaboration.

It all started out peacefully with Monkey One wanting to make an Irish Raisin bread for class tomorrow. His class has been studying the different Christmas traditions from around the world. As you might have guessed his country is Ireland. Now I have never made bread from scratch before, but I am game for new adventures. I have always wanted to make bread. Now that I have more free time it is on my list of things to do that I have been putting off. Or so I thought,until I saw that the recipe he had printed out had some holes in it. I tried finding a really close match with Google, but no luck. We went for it any way. Better to try than not right? Absolutely,you should always try new things.

Here is my little guy mixing the dry part of his batter.

Then he mixed in his wet ingredients. Nice job monkey!

He added his raisins…

Stirred it all up…

Look at how yummy it looks. Never mind eating the bread, I could just eat up Monkey Two :)

Now while Monkey Two’s bread was baking, Monkey One and I went to work on his project. His was supposed to make a batch of chocolate chip cookies from the ingredients that his math teacher gave them. He also had to figure out how to reduce the batch from 3 1/2 doz, down to 120 cookies and to 20 cookies using fractions and decimals. Cool right? Ummm Hmmm, another recipe with holes sigh.

Once he completed the math portion we went for the 3 1/2 doz version, that way if something went wrong we might be able to salvage at least some of the batch. Now Monkey One did well measuring and putting all of the ingredients together. Then right as we were about to start the heavy mixing Monkey Two entered the picture.

M2-Can I take pictures Mom?

TR-Sure, just be careful with the camera.

M2-Oh, that looks good. See!

M1-Let me see! Hey Mom keep doing that. My turn…M2 take a picture of me.

M2- Hey mom, you can put this on the blog and say the monkeys were monkeying around…giggle,giggle.

giggle, hahahaha, giggle. M1 you’re hilarious!

TR-Hey, M1 these are your cookies. What are you doing?

If I had seen this at the time I quite possibly would have taken my child that minute to be evaluated. I am still debating it. My word!

Wait it gets better…

TR- M1! M2 where did you guys go? You are supposed to be doing this!

I’ve always said that M1 was Jim Carey in the making… can you say DRAMATIC? Goodness, gracious these boys TICKLE me to no end :)

I have a feeling that this might be their future calling. M1 hamming it up for the camera and M2 filming it all. Then I found this on the camera as well?

Ummm, your guess is as good as mine. Miming the primal scream? Because it was silent in the living room, other than Monkey Two laughing his little head off. Now I know why. By the way, please excuse my sorely disorganized hutch.

*Update- I was told this morning, amid proud laughter, that it was not a primal scream mime. If you look at the picture you will see a little glimmer of silver around the corner of the buffet. That is a tiny remote controlled helicopter. M1 was Godzilla and M2 was supposed to capture it all. Geez… only my boys :) *

So that would be the goofiness that was running a muck tonight. What about the messy part you ask? Okay, here is what they did to my kitchen.

They pulled out every possible ingredient they could get their hands on thinking that they might need them all. See the wine in the corner, I pulled that out when I saw the kitchen, knowing I would need it later. Mmmmm…so nice right now while I blog. Their mess did actually come in handy. They were able to decorate some cookies that I had made earlier, while they waited for their goodies to bake.

I would say yummy, but I am not so sure about M1’s choice of Nerds and blue Pixie Stick for flavorings.

Now as to the bread and cookies…lets just say I will not be passing on the recipes that were full of holes. The bread came out looking great at first and then did this… I hope that it taste better than it looks.

Monkey One’s cookies are actually okay…well at least half of them. He forgot to check on the other half and learned his first lesson of baking. Never forget about what you have in the oven.

Well my kitchen is all clean and back in order, the monkeys are sleeping peacefully, my surfer is snuggled up to me on the couch while I blog and enjoy my well deserved Pinot noir, life couldn’t be any better.

I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings. :)

Tickled Red