Children's Book Club - The Marshmallow Incident

Can I just start out this post by saying, once again, how much I love Children's Book Club? Love it. A lot. We got the chance to hold it at our home this month, this time with my daughter being the hostess, and she was thrilled. She chose this book that is by the same people who did Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, another favourite. This one is a silly story about two neighbouring towns, the Town of Left and the Town of Right, who do not get along and who have a dotted yellow line running down the length of the boarder. Knights are given the charge of defending this line, and when one of the townspeople accidentally breaches the boarder, chaos ensues. I try to take my activities as closely as I can from the book, and this one had lots of great ones to use. The knights in the book arm their bows with marshmallows rather than arrows, so I made this target from poster board. (I used my set of mixing bowls to trace the sizes of circles)

My oldest son, just HAPPENS to have a marshmallow bow-and-arrow toy, (you can find them here if you are interested) and he agreed to let us borrow it while he was at school --- as long as I promised to leave up the target so he could do it when he came home! Deal.

The kids all got three shots with the weapon before we moved on.

Next we played marshmallow tic-tac-toe, but I didn't want to write X and O on them, so we played big vs little. This game was a hit and we played several rounds of it. When the game was over, we divided up the marshmallows and let the kids gobble them up.

Then we made some marshmallow sculptures using both large and small marshmallows, toothpicks, and shish kebab skewers. Most of the creations were fairly abstract, though we did have a definite snowman, but this little girl came up with this on her own. It is a giraffe. Aren't you totally impressed? I was.

There were lots of fun ways to go with this snack. We could make homemade marshmallows, smores, trail mix, marshmallow pops, marshmallow fluff on ice cream.... but in the end I went with these squares that I love and never make.

Mississippi Mud Bars

Brownie:

1 cup margarine (or butter)

2 cups sugar

4 eggs

1 1/2 cup flour

1/3 cup cocoa

3 cups mini marshmallows

Icing:

1/2 cup margarine (or butter)

1/3 cup cocoa

1/2 cup evaporated milk

4 cups icing sugar

For brownies: cream margarine and sugar, add eggs and mix until blended. Gradually add dry ingredients and mix. Put into a greased 9x13" pan, and bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes.

Spread marshmallows on top of brownie in a single layer. Return to oven for 3-5 minutes (you want them to be quite puffy and stuck together without being too brown)

Cool 30 minutes.

Mix together icing and spread over marshmallow layer.

We also drank hot chocolate with marshmallows floating in our mugs. The world's coziest beverage.

This last game idea was really fun, but too complex for the ages of some of the kids we had attending.

So I set up the board and when the big kids came home, we played it.

It was like checkers, obviously, but instead of trying to have your pieces be the last on the board, the object of this game was to see who could eat the most marshmallows.

When you jumped your opponent, you got to eat his marshmallow! When you got a king, you got to eat your own marshmallow! It went really well. Super fun.