Rovers, Clowns and Dinos

HOW TWEET IT IS:  Not every day a NASA rover on Mars sends a message your way, but for us, today was that day. :)

A Twitter user, HomeGeekonomics, had discovered the Mars cake we made a year plus ago, and posted it to their blog, and on Twitter, including @MarsCuriosity (the official NASA account for the Mars Science Laboratory on Mars) in the note.

Someone replied to the Tweet (below), wishing for a similar cake, and I replied to all that Mars is tasty.

A bit later, Curiosity weighed in, writing ...

Pretty darn cool!  (BTW, Valles Marineris is the extra-grande canyon running along the middle of part of Mars. It's 4,000 km (2,500 mi) long, 200 km (120 mi) wide and up to 7 km (23,000 ft) deep. On our cake, it's where I joined the two halves of the planet with red frosting!)

The link to the original blog post about how we made the cake is here:  http://magnoliaprep.blogspot.com/2012/08/let-them-eat-cake.html

SEND IN THE CLOWNS:  As I was going through the kids' bookshelves, getting them back-to-school ready, I came across a book I'd forgotten we had, called "How to Draw Clowns." Oh, the horror!  Wait, I mean, oh, that sounds like fun for the kids. ...

They laughed when they saw the book because they know how much I detest clowns.

We flipped through it's pages and decided they'd give drawing a crying clown a go.  Here are their efforts. ...

Next, they were free to use any of the tutorials in the book to draw the clown of their choice.

CJ chose to draw a bear.

Annabelle drew a female clown.

Now, the clown book goes back to the library, and hopefully I never have to see it again.

WORK IT OUT: The last couple of weeks we've gotten back to using some workbooks, specifically one with horribly butchered sentences the kids have to fix (capitalization, punctuation, that kind of thing). One of the sentences today had to do with a kid fixing his mother's answering machine.  "What's an answering machine?" they both asked. When I told them it was like voicemail on my cell phone, they got it.  How quickly some technological gadgets become obsolete.

BOXING DAY: Kennedy's birthday was this weekend, and we gave him a hard case for his guitar as a present.  It came in a nice big cardboard box, which Annabelle and CJ have played with for hours.

Annabelle has dubbed it Adventure Box, and each of the kids has their own ID card to swipe to get in.

Speaking of Kennedy's birthday, here are a few photos of the Jurassic Park cake and Jurassic Park cookies we made.

It was fun.  For the cookies I tried to think of the seminal moments in the movie and represent them in sugar and butter. And I didn't want to do a straight-up dino-body cake, I wanted to do something less obvious. My mind went to the scene where the park visitors are shown the incubator where baby velociraptors are being born and Dr. Grant is mortified that they bred raptors and Dr. Malcom utters his famous "Life finds a way" quote.

The kids were helpful, looking up various scenes and finding good photos from which to work.

They helped sculpt the eggs out of crispy rice treats, and then we covered them in fondant. 

It was fun making the raptor hatchling. 

Annabelle helped with some of the painting (with food coloring)

What a cute little 'raptor ... it can't wait to grow up and go after you!

The cookies were inspired by everything from Dennis Nedry's Hawaiian shirt to the shaving cream can he hid the dino DNA in. 

And speaking of dino DNA, we had to do a cookie featuring 'Bingo,' the narrator of the cartoon about how Jurassic Park dinos are created. We also had to do cookies with a dino-DNA sucking mosquito embedded in amber (or, peach Jolly Rancher, as was our case).