April Fools' Food

We had a pretty good April Fools' Day and just celebrated with some fun food for dinner and dessert.  A few years ago I made meatloaf cupcakes with pink mashed potato frosting, and the kids were tricked, and they were really mad.  So I've tried to involve them in the dinner-making since then so that it's just a silly fun dinner.  We've done a few variations of the meatloaf & mashed potato dinners, and this year I wanted to do something different.  So I found the perfect dinner idea here: hot dogs wrapped in dough, decorated to look like bugs and snakes.

I made a small batch of sweet roll dough with my breadmaker and felt a bit rebellious because it didn't rise a second time.  Guess what?  It turned out just fine.  Pretty, fluffy, and just as yummy as usual.  What's the point of the second rise, again?  Sorry.  Moving on.

Eliza helped me wrap the hot dogs in strips of dough, I baked them in the oven, then all of the kids decorated the critters with baggies of ketchup and mustard, potato sticks, and thin slices of olives.

We did have Mashed Potato Cupcakes with our Snake-And-Bug-Dogs, simply because we had leftover mashed potatoes in the fridge.  So I put the warmed up mashed potatoes into my piping bag and piped them into foil cupcake liners using my big round tip.  Done.

For dessert we made Sushi (see the above link) by wrapping Fruit Roll-Ups around Cloud Cakes (aka, the closest thing to a Twinkie available right now), slicing them into pieces, and putting a bit more Fruit Roll-Up in the center of each piece.  My kids have never had anything Twinkie-like, and didn't know what to expect from that particular product, but they have had Fruit Roll-Ups, though it's been years since I bought any, and they were so anxious to eat the Fruit Roll-Ups that they had little to no interest in the sushi, haha.  I just enjoyed watching them try to eat it with chop sticks.  Except Eliza, who saw no need for unfamiliar utensils.

After our Sushi dessert, we had an FHE in preparation for General Conference this weekend.  We watched The Apostle Song a couple of times, talked about each Apostle, then played our Apostle matching game.  And simply because it was April Fools' Day, I felt a harmless prank in the form of a sugary treat (yes, #2 of the evening) was in order.  So I pulled out some Jell-O disguised as juice.  Cat saw what I'd done almost immediately, but Jack and Eliza kept trying to drink their Jell-O.

Once they figured it out, we all laughed about it.

I was glad that there were no hurt feelings this time,

just some happy kids with a second dessert.