Saturdays With Dad: Now with pictures!

For the last 12 years, OhCountess has been an angel of mercy, working as a Registered Nurse. You will never find a profession that deserves more respect. As the significant other of an RN. I've learned that one of the sacrifices I'd learn to live with is that every other Saturday, my wife works; 26 weekends a year.

The title of the post describes a topic I should write about much more often. Every other Saturdays, for me as a dad, our sometimes an opportunity to spend quality time with my daughters in my way. Every other Saturday...it's Daddy Time.

Yesterday was one of the other Saturdays. Mom was at work. As is typical for my girls, they were up and Adam at 6:30 am. A bit early for me on a Saturday, but that's life in the fast lane.

OhPrincess1 came to me with a question. She wanted to know if we had plans for the day because there was something she wanted to do. I'll be honest, I had no plans for the day so a suggestion sounded like a great idea. OhPricncess1 asked if today, we could make something in her Easy Bake Oven.
What a fantastic idea!

Step 1:  Clean the kitchen1. I don't know how many people are like me, but before I START cooking, I clean the kitchen. I love counter space and I want all of it available. I also used this is a carrot. You wanna Easy Bake...well we can't start until things get cleaned. I think we done good.Step 2: Pick out the project and get organized! OhPrincess1 picked the Cinnabon. Well why not? It was brunch time. She did a great job setting everything out and getting it organized. And note how nice it is when the counter is clean...just sayin...

Step3: Add water and mix. I'm just not sure that the bowl that comes with the Easy Bake Oven is really big enough. It was almost impossible to keep the dough in the bowl and what is with that stir thingy with the pan pusher on the end? Seriously...who designed this thing!

Step 3: Talk on the phone. Is this a genetic thing? Baking gets start, the phone rings and chatting begins. It's got to be a girl thing I just don't understand.


The dough was looking pretty darn good. Nice and smooth. You have to wonder though how anyone expects this to feed a family of four.
We just didn't think that the full size rolling pin was going to work. Look at it. That's like 200 times more rolling pin then we need. I firmly believe that you should always use the right tool for the job. OhPrincess found the rolling pin that came with a toy baking set they had. PERFECTION!

OhPrincess1 proudly loads her culinary creation into the oven. Honestly, this was about as much fun as I've had in a very long time. Just look at that face! She was so thrilled.

Waiting for these things to bake is probably the most drawn out cooking experience EVER! We did an experiment to see if it was true in this case. You know how "a watched pot never boils"...well a watched batch of cinnamon rolls still takes 14 minutes no matter how much staring you do.

While we waited for the first batch to bake, OhPrincess2 wanted to take a crack at this. We got her going on the dough trying desperately to keep a majority of the dry ingredients in the bowel. If you ever need to replace a power mixer, just use a 5 year old. Same result.

 
We got the dough mix, rolled, sprayed with cooking spray (can we just say Pam), covered in cinnamon and sugar and cut into Fourths (great opportunity to practice our fractions...don'tcha thing?

This time, we even remember to spray the pan. We didn't want a repeat of the Great Stuck Cake incident of '07. [shivers]
The first batch was done while just after we got done mixing the second batch. We quickly discovered the waiting for the 15 minutes of cool down time isn't
improved by staring either. Although OhPrincess2 was quite taken by cleaning the counter.

Eventually, we got the frosting mixed and the package reread while waiting for the first batch to cool and the second batch to bake.

The time went DING! OhPrincess was really excited. She was very proud of her hard work.
I couldn't blame her. They turned out GREAT. Apparently, my aggressive movements towards the tasty treats was unwelcome. She defended those things like French defend Paris.  Just kidding. She did a good job and I never got one.

With that crazy stir/spreader/pan pushing thing, she covered our little nuggets of goodness with sugary slurry.

All that was left for her to do was sample these little morsels.

The verdict was - AWESOME!

OhPrincess2 got join in the waiting fun. They were baked, but how do you explain to a 5 year old that until the red sticker turns something other then red...we don't touch. 

Eventually, they were cool enough. We learned a valuable lesson with the first ones. Spreading with that multi-tasker wasn't nearly as much fun as just dunking these things in the sugar stuff.

After all was said and done. We had a blast. I grew up in a family with 3 out of the 4 members were boys. I really never had an opportunity to do fun things like this. The Easy Bake Oven was just something boys didn't do. Too bad.