Baking Muffins & Growing Magic Beans Part 1

This weekend Hazel and I baked some banana muffins and we planted magic beans. First our muffin recipe. I adapted this recipe from Jessica Seinfeld's Deceptively Delicious. As last week, I am trying to include more nuts, whole grains, fruit and vegetables in our diets.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup sugar (brown or white)
1/2 cup almond butter
2 medium carrots pureed (you may want to add a bit of water to puree them raw or you can cook them)
2 medium very ripe bananas mashed (Hazel is my masher!)
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1 egg
1/2 cup flax seed meal
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup of ground walnuts and almonds (I ground mine in the blender more to hide the walnuts from Hazel)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

Preheat the oven to 350 and spray a muffin pan with a cooking spray (do not use paper liners or the muffins will stick to them).

Mix sugar, almond butter, carrots, bananas, egg and applesauce in large bowl.

Mix the remainder of the ingredients in a smaller bowl.

Add dry ingredients to liquid ingredients and mix well. Then scoop into muffin pan. This is the first time Hazel successfully helped scoop them. I can see her improving each time we bake together and with age!

Bake for 20-25 minutes (the recipe said 15-20 but I found mine took closer to 25 and still were a bit moist). Then cool on a rack and eat warm or cool. Yield 12 muffins.

Now on to our magic beans!! For the first part of this project (the part I'm sharing here) I got the idea from StrongStart which was featured on Sharing Saturday #14. Over the weekend we planted some magic beans. I had to go out and buy more jelly beans because my dear husband got into the magic beans that I set aside without realizing they were for a project.

Magic Beans Planted (Left: Magic beans = jelly beans) (Right: I will share another time)

So I put some garden dirt into an egg container and we planted one of each color of jelly beans. I added the two later after I bought more magic beans. Then we put them by the window. In a couple of days we had this:

Hazel decided we were growing candles at this point. We drew in her garden journal. I drew a picture and wrote candles and then she added to it. I had labeled the page Magic Beans and added the date. Later in the day we had:

I put a jelly bean on each lollipop stick for this phase. At this point Hazel guessed lollipops, which of course is what we are growing. The next morning she woke up to this:

If you try this, make sure you wet the soil and pack it around the sticks to get the lollipops to stand. She was so excited this morning. She wanted to pick all of them and have one after lunch each day and we had to call Daddy at work to tell him about it.

Checking out her lollipops that she grew!

Overall this was a fun gardening activity to try especially with the cold wet weather we are having and having our yard sprayed for ticks so we can't go on the grass for 3 days. This definitely entertained her for a few days.

Oh, and I bought a copy of Jack and the Beanstalk today which I'm going to read to her soon. Hope all is well with you!!


This is where I link up...

Happy Family Times #7

 

Kelly at Happy Whimsical Hearts and I run a link party to share your family times every Tuesday. Please link up below and visit Happy Whimsical Hearts to read about her quality family time!

This weekend we spent most of our family time outside. On Saturday we got the pleasure of feeding the ducks. They actually came up to the driveway next to our garage and we fed them there.

Hazel was of course very excited but we kept her pretty calm and quiet so we could watch them from only a few feet away.

My taking pictures is actually what scared them away. Off they flew to the brook, but we went to do other things away from the back yard and they came right back. I got another picture from around the corner of the garage.

Then after they left this time they hung out in the brook near our bird feeders. We do think they have a nest back in the corner where the brook turns.

After feeding the ducks, Daddy and Hazel rebuilt the fairy house since something had knocked it down a bit.

And I found them relaxing on the patio as well.

Sunday after church, we did some gardening. Hazel and I planted the impatiens while Daddy dug a new garden for me to plant some hollyhocks and gladiolas. We are hoping to grow a natural fence along the driveway a bit for more privacy with them.

A few of our impatiens

Our new garden

Then we played on the swingsets. Hazel was having a blast. We have been working on pumping on the swings, but it has not stuck yet. So we took turns pushing her. Then of course she wanted to play zoo train with me and made me ask her if we were there yet a hundred times.

Then we ended our outside time by watering everything we planted and cleaning up. Hazel of course wanted to help with the watering.

Now it is your turn to share how your family has spent some quality time lately.

~ please link up (family time oriented giveaways are ok, but please no Etsy shops)
~just crafts will be deleted since this is to share family times

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Ok, now for our PARTY!! Please share your FUN Family Times!!

The Colors of Us--Exploring all the browns of the world

Just a quick reminder that Sharing Saturday and Homemade Mother's Day Gift link parties are still open. Please come linkup with your child-oriented crafts and activities and your great Mother's Day ideas! And of course visit to check out all the wonderful ideas already shared!!

This week I'm going to share some multicultural story books Hazel and I have discovered and liked thus far. With one of them we have tried  a painting activity, so I will share that with you as well. Some musical resources for this book would be DARIA's song Beautiful Rainbow World (on her Beautiful Rainbow World CD and her I Have a Dream CD) and Kevin So's song Individual (on his Individual CD and Along the Way CD). (I will share more about Kevin So's music at a later date, but Individual goes along with this book, so I'm sharing it here.)

Mother's Day Gifts

With Mother's Day only one week away, I thought it would be fun to share some homemade Mother's Day gift ideas. So if you have any from this year or previous, please link them below.

I thought I would share with you the gift we made last year for all of Hazel's women in her life. I took pictures of the one I kept, but we gave them to her grandmothers and aunts as well. (I can't remember if we made one for her godmother or not). This poem is floating around on-line. I believe the place I got it from was DLTK's Kids. (There are several Mother's Day poems at that link.)

Sharing Saturday #18

Wow, we got some great crafts and activities shared last week. If you haven't stopped by to check them out, please do. Also if you have a family time post that you would like to share with us at Happy Family Times please stop by. It is a great place to get some ideas on what you can do as a family. A new one starts on Monday night (Tuesday in Australia for my co-host).