Saturday, September 5, 2009

The Solar System (only in chocolate)


This week the girls have been having so much fun studying the solar system and learning all about planets, the sun, stars, comets, asteroids, and the moon. Raven found a fun little recipe in our Thematic Unit Planet book for solar system cookies. The recipe was for sugar cookies but of course my children have inherited my great love of all things chocolate, so we decided to tweak the recipe a bit and do a chocolate chip cookie instead. Mmmmmm. You can either use a basic chocolate chip cookie dough recipe and make large cookies or you can cheat and buy the pre-made Pillsbury "Big Deluxe" ones. I'm sure my inner Martha Stewart was sighing and shaking her head but we decided to go the easy route and used the Pillsbury ones. ;)

We just flattened each cookie dough round a bit with our palms to give each cookie a little more surface area to work with and then we added M & M candies to each cookie dough round. We used an orange M & M in the center of each cookie to represent the sun and then placed the other M & M candies circling around the "sun" to represent the different planets orbiting the sun. We added a yellow M & M to represent Mercury, another yellow for Mars, green for Earth, red for Venus, orange for Jupiter, yellow for Saturn, and then 2 blue candies to represent Uranus and Neptune. We left Pluto off since it's no longer considered a planet as of 2006 but Ella decided to eat one in memory of it anyways and declared Pluto rather tasty, lol.


Mmmmmmmm. The solar system has never been so tasty. *smile*