Is It Math? Is It Science? It's Cooking Time!

Earlier this week we quickly finished up our schoolday in order to free up some time to do a cooking project. We needed snacks to take to school, so Mom decided it would be fun to make them.

First we started with making soft pretzels. We each helped Mom dump the ingredients into the mixer, and then we set the dough aside to rise.

While it was rising, we made peanut butter balls. It was fun taking the "peanut butter dough" and rolling it into balls, then rolling the ball into powdered sugar or crushed corn flakes. Those went into the fridge and out came the pretzel dough.

We rolled the dough into long snakes. Then Mom showed us how to make a U shape with the dough and fold each end to make a pretzel shape. It was hard for some of us, be we all managed to figure it out eventually.

Then Mom plopped them in boiling water for a little bit and then shook salt all over them. Then we put them into the oven to finish cooking.

YUM! They were so good! At first we were unhappy that they wouldn't be like the crunchy pretzels we buy from the store, but they were so good that we ate the entire batch right then and had to make a second one for school the next day!

And we tried the peanut butter balls, too. YUMMY! But there were enough of those that we didn't need to make another batch. Besides, we were getting full from all the pretzels we ate.

So was it math we learned? Yes. We counted the cups of flour and figured out how many 1/2 cupfuls of honey we would need to equal 2 cups. We also learned time as we calculated what time the dough would be finished rising.

Was it science we learned? Yes. We talked about how dough rises (thanks to the yeast) and learned about friction and ways to reduce it as dough stuck to the table and we put oil down to stop it from sticking.

But most of all, it was Cooking Time! We love Cooking Time!