Onto day two County Fair. Thank goodness the weather has been staying nice so we can still hold classes outside. Today was filled with yumminess, blackberry jam, butter, scones, and blue corn muffins. Starting the day out with a refresher course on watercolor techniques. They children put all the different techniques on one page today to help them remember, and for today's object they painted farm animals. We gave them little plastic animals to look at and some pictures of farm animals to do their watercolor with. Too bad it would have been nice to have real goats, cows, and chickens to paint, unfortunately our small space doesn't really allow for that. After that they had free painting, and some did some abstract stuff.
Next up jam and butter. One of my most favorite things is fresh jam. I grew up with my grandma always mashing up some fruit to make freezer jam. It is so easy and it taste so fresh, I love it. Freezer jam doesn't gel up as nicely as cooked jam, but I find with freezer jam you can taste more complexities of the fruit, because it doesn't get cooked down so much. Don't get me wrong though I like it both ways. Today we used blackberries which I hadn't tried before. I usually go for raspberries. They are a little bit harder to mash down, but once you get those little guys all smashed to bits, it's a delight. Mix in a bit of sugar and freezer jam pectin bag and you are good to go. Right after the jam we went straight to making butter, since we needed to let the jam refrigerate 30 minutes before diving in. So butter, I just love the word, butter. It is the pillar of baking and goodness. So, it might clog an artery or two, it is just so darn tasty. The children each poured in the heavy cream into the blender, after it had come to room temperature. Once in the blender tossed in a little bit of salt, and blended. You can visually see it go from liquid cream to fluffy whipped cream to breaking down and separating into butter and buttermilk within 3 minutes. We then dumped out the buttermilk, and washed the butter with some ice water until it ran clear, or nearly almost. The kids got to taste the butter on our homemade blue corn muffins, and the blackberry jam on homemade scones.
The children taking turns stirring the blackberry freezer jam, while I am explaining what is happening to the fruit.
A photo of the jam and butter chilling in the fridge. The butter was super creamy.
A couple photos of the scones getting made and the final product. I actually bake mine in a round and then break them apart after they are baked.
Since, we like to cook and bake we made hot pads with the kids in the shape of a mouse or chicken. The kids picked out their fabric traced a pattern and cut out the fabric piece. They also picked out brads for eyes, seam binding for tails or hanging loops, and ric-rac for those that made a chicken. We sandwiched all of the fabrics together with the thermal and regular cotton batting in the middle. Then each child was able to help sew in all together on the sewing machine. I think they are incredibly cute hot pads and can't wait to use my girls'.
After all of the kids were done with the hot pad sewing we had some spare time. The kids suggested we play the game of telephone. A great game where you whisper a phrase into the persons ear next to you and the phrase get whispered around the circle, and the last person says aloud what the phrase is. Typically the phrase gets all distorted, and doesn't come out the way it originated. We also had a brief game of Simon Says. A great way to end the day.
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