Back to School Countdown (Day #22)

Pizza and Cupcakes!

Playdates are fun, but sometime you need an organized activity to keep the kids in order, so I started today by baking some cupcakes for the kids to decorate.

I almost always make my own frosting, chocolate is my favorite, but today I was out of cocoa, so vanilla buttercream it was. (Straight out of my Betty Crocker Cookbook!)

I put the frosting in zip baggies and cut the tips when it was time for the kids to decorate!
This way they could do it all on their own.

When our guests arrived, we had some free play, and the Mommy's got to chat a little, before it was time to make our pizzas for lunch.  It is always fun yet chaotic when you have a house full of kids, excited and running in many directions.  We also have a lot of play things to choose from.  Not to mention, my son was overly excited to have a BOY to play with, although he WAS my 4 year old daughter's playdate for today!

Things went as planned and we started the pizzas by giving each child his/her dough on a plate.  They flattened out their dough and added the toppings they wanted, which consisted of just cheese. 

Today, none of the kids were in the mood for sauce or pepperoni.

While we were waiting the 10 minutes it took the pizzas to bake, we used this time to clean up some of the toys on the floor.  When the timer went off, I removed the pizzas from the oven, sliced them and returned them to their rightful owner. 

Making Pizza is one of my kids favorite things to do and eat for lunch.

Everyone enjoyed their pizza but left plenty of room for their dessert!

As promised the Pizza dough recipe is as follows:

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 package of active dry yeast (2 1/4 teaspoons)

2 TBS vegetable oil

1 tsp salt

1 TBS white sugar

1 cup warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)

Mix all dry ingredients, add water and oil, mix with a wooden spoon.  I knead gently just to incorporate all of the flour.  I shape it into a ball and cut 4 equal portions for my kids to make their own pizza, or I will roll it out myself for 1 family pizza.

Another fun and yummy idea with this recipe is to roll the dough out to 1/4" and use your pizza cutter to cut 1"x 2" rectangles from the dough (size is just approximate since I don't have a picture to share), and deep fry them.  It only takes about 2 1/2-3 minutes to deep fry the dough into pillows/nuggets.  Make sure to drain them onto a paper towel before eating.  You can dip them into pizza sauce as an appetizer or brush them with melted butter and sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar for dessert!  I do both and they are a hit either way!

I hope you enjoyed our playdate!  Join us tomorrow to see what other fun stuff we find to do during our back to school countdown!