Egypt Was A Piece of Cake

I was sold on the Mystery of History even before we were instructed in lesson 24 to bake a cake and decorate it like Ancient Egypt. Dessert (a desert dessert, if you will) only served to seal the deal on my love affair with this curriculum. I baked the cake, but gave the boys lots of free reign with the frosting. That was hard for me. I'm a control freak in the kitchen. I did however strongly encourage them to be heavy handed with the frosting, because my philosophy regarding buttercream is that more is best. I used store bought for both the cake and the frosting. I'll just go ahead and confess that since it is for some reason weighing on my conscience. Homemade is so much better, but nine and ten year olds are not picky about cake. Only vegetables. Max took great pains to make sure the frosting was applied just right.

Both boys were really excited about this project, even though it came at the tail end of an extremely long homeschooling day. I was impressed with their stamina, so I decided to reward them with a surprise. We went to a candy store near our house that sells novelty candies in self-serve bins. We purchased a family of nine gummy frogs to float in the Nile River, and exactly 30 sweet tart Lego blocks that we used to construct a pyramid. We each picked out just a VERY FEW pieces of candy for a treat as well. I could hardly believe it when my total at check-out was nearly seven dollars!! What in the world? For gummy frogs! Seven dollars worth of candy atop my 98 cent cake mix. :) We decided on the way home that this cake is representative of the Golden Age of Egypt, which happened to be what we read about in today's lesson. The boys had a ball adding their special treats to the cake, as well as a few "camels". The camels are suspect, seeing as how they came from a bag of iced CIRCUS animal cookies. Camels under the big top? Anyway, I love how the cake turned out, and dessert was the best part of supper.

History. It's sweet.