Five on Friday- Belated

Things are more than busy this week. Each day has held something out of the ordinary for us, so this post has been delayed. It's been chaotic, so it's nice to sit here at the computer and remember all the nice things about the week.

1. Mother's Day. Because we had some sickness lingering in our house, we weren't going to see my mother (who suffers from COPD). Instead, my husband asked me if I could pick anything I wanted for supper, what would it be. I picked hot dogs and potato chips. Glamorous, eh?

Also the children (minus the baby who was napping) and I carried on the Mother's Day tradition of making cookies (except for my oldest daughter who went to town with Daddy and who would be making cookies with me later in the week). We made "Million Dollar" peanut butter cookies. The whole process was like the week--chaotic; what can you expect with five children helping in the kitchen all at once? But we had fun, and the cookies were yummy.

Me--wearing my Mother's Day gift apron and holding cookies ready for oven

2. Chicken. The Friday before Mother's Day, my husband drove to Fisher's for their chicken sale. It's a bit of a drive, but the sale is so good that even when you factor in mileage, we save a lot of money. We ended up with 3 huge boxes of chicken to put in the freezer. We also grilled chicken that evening and enjoyed a beautiful salad from our raised beds.

Some of the salad before--picture courtesy of one of the kids

The salad after, ready for the table.

3. Kids' Camera.  Back in February we went to a flea market and had a scavenger hunt. It was fun, and we found a digital camera for $5 for the children to use. They've been having fun with it. I just need to figure out how to get the date out of the bottom corner.

This is what happens when a kid takes pictures at a birthday party:

A picture of the birthday girl, sort of.

4. Birthday Un-cake.  Last December one daughter got a gingerbread house cake for her birthday. This weekend, my oldest daughter turned 8 (see picture below). She wanted a gingerbread house. I made it out of sugar cookie dough instead because gingerbread seemed not spring-y enough. With SweetTart roof tiles and other assorted candies, pretzels, pink sugar wafers, and colored graham cracker crumbs, a sugar cookie house was constructed.

Back view

Front view

5. Birthday cookies and cupcakes. Because my daughter loves bunnies, I made bunny cookies! To be honest, I thought the front yard looked bare. That house needed an inhabitant or two. When the cake was served, a bunny was standing on the front porch. 

Okay. To be totally and completely 100% honest, the real reason I made the bunny cookies was that I've wanted to experiment with decorating cookies with royal icing. I think all the cookies in magazines and on Pinterest look so pretty, and I wanted to try it. So I did. The results?

They do look like bunnies, I think.

The results were not as professional as I wanted them to be, but I learned trial-and-error style. I'm looking forward to trying again sometime to see if I can do better. And the birthday girl was thrilled by her bunnies.

Because I couldn't leave well enough alone with the sugar already provided, I decided to stick the bunnies on some cupcakes. I've served up birthday pie before, but for my own neurotic reasons I felt "just" cookies were inadequate for a birthday party.

Bunny cookies on "moss-covered" cupcakes

And while the cupcakes looked nice enough (even without the bunnies), the kids preferred eating the cookies. When I was cleaning up, as is usually true with regular birthday cake, I threw away several cupcakes that had been licked clean of frosting.

Until next Friday. Or Sunday. Or whenever.