Fun Fourth Food

As Ian gets older, we want him to know the meaning behind all of the holidays we celebrate. For now, while he is so young, I decided to celebrate in a way he understands...food!

Our 4th started off in the kitchen. I had found a great idea for pretzel sparklers on Taste of Home's website and wanted to try them.

While I was at the store that morning shopping for groceries, I found CandiQuik and decided to give it a whirl instead of making the white chocolate dip for the pretzels. I'm so glad I did - it tasted great and melted down smooth as silk (unlike my previous attempt with white chocolate chips, which turned into a pile of unusable gook).

Starting to look festive! I dipped the pretzel sticks in the CandiQuik and then sprinkled blue and red sugar over the coating.

As I was nearing the end of the bag of pretzels, I realized I still had quite a bit of the CandiQuik left. So I thought I'd dunk a few strawberries that I had on hand.

And voila! Strawberry sparklers!

As I was working on the next part of our 4th of July dinner, Ian started getting pretty hungry. So James put him in his high chair and gave him a snack. The next thing I hear from the kitchen is Big Band music. One lucky little boy was getting song and dance as entertainment during snack time!

For dinner, I found this great recipe for Flag Pizza, also on Taste of Home's website. I couldn't resist trying it out. For the first pizza, I modified it a bit and cut the pepperoni's into large stars for the top left corner and little stars to go between the mozarella sticks.

The second pizza was a little larger, so we just used large stars all the way around. I also used a homemade pizza dough for both pizzas. Somehow all the pizza got eaten before I got a picture of the finished product, so you'll have to make it yourself to see how it turns out! :-)

In order to have something a little healthy to go along with all of this, I made a traditional strawberry and blueberry fruit salad, but for fun cut the bananas up into little stars.

I also made surprise patriotic cupcakes and James helped me decorate them.

Wanna see why they are surprise cupcakes? Ta-daaaaaa!

Red, white, and blue insides! I saw so many fun cakes like this running around on blogs this week that I couldn't resist trying it myself. We sure are enjoying all of our 4th goodies!

And cause I couldn't resist, a couple of close-ups. Skip the next two pix if you are tired of pictures!

The strawberry sparklers.

Pretzel sparklers!

Somebody thought it all tasted very good!

Funny 4th story - when James pulled the plug to drain the water after a bath to clean up that very messy child, Ian started waving bye-bye to the water. That's the first time he has done that! So cute to see his brain develop and make all these connections that we take for granted.

Well, buddy, we had a great day! Thanks for being Mommy's taste-tester. We are all so blessed to live in a country where we still have so many freedoms!