Earth Day celebration - with cake!
What a tasty way to celebrate Earth Day! I had a Google search looking for inspiration for Earth Day activities and found several playdough-based ones. We are going through a cake-baking phase so I moulded the two ideas together and pitched the option of an ‘Earth cake’ to the kids. They didn’t need much convincing!
We had ripe bananas at home so we opted for a banana bread recipe. We collected the ingredients and made the batter. I found a dome-shaped ovenproof dish which worked perfectly for our purpose.
While the banana bread was cooling we started with the (shop-bought) fondant. We called over a friend and started the fun!
The fondant needs to be kneaded for it to be moldable. It really is just edible playdough.
Once the kids got their creativity out of the way, they rolled out their piece of fondant. One became all the ocean and with the help of food colouring gel, we painted it blue.
The two other pieces served as the continents and countries.
The kids wanted to do the Northern Hemisphere as this would have naturally followed the shape of the globe and the maps as we know them. So we had a little chat about the global south and how the maps show the Earth in one way but really, from space, we could look at it from a completely different angle. They found this thought interesting and agreed to do the South hemisphere.
We brought down our globe, opened a world atlas and started cutting. We had to re-cut the continents several times due to getting the Earth-continent rations very wrong but in the end settled to an acceptable size. We painted these green.
After this, we realised that the food colouring takes a very long time to dry so we had to put the hairdryer in action. The kids made a note of this not being very environmentally friendly which tells me, they understand the message really well.
Once everything was somewhat dry and just a little bit sticky we started assembling our Earth cake. We started with Antarctica and stuck on the continents in relation to it (more or less).
We are really chuffed with the result, it is beautiful, it is tasty and it is our precious Earth.
