Today for lunch, I served my girls chicken drumsticks, mashed potatoes with butter and gravy, and peas & carrots.
Ordinarily they would complain about having to eat vegetables, but today they were happy as clams, because their entire lunch was made of candy and cupcakes!
Because I’m the kind of Mom who thinks it’s OK to eat dessert instead of lunch once in awhile.
I saw this idea on TV last week, and I really wanted to make it, but of course, I did it the frugal way.
The chicken drumstick was supposed to be made of a cupcake with a donut hole on top, and the whole thing was supposed to be frosted and covered in cornflake crumbs. The chicken bone was a piped, white chocolate confection, which just seemed like a whole lot of work to me, and also white chocolate is too expensive.
I frugalized the chicken by just cutting a cupcake in half, and placing it cut-side down on top of a whole cupcake. After frosting, I coated it with graham cracker crumbs, since I didn’t have any cornflakes, and I drew a chicken bone shape on the back of a glossy, white cardboard photo envelope.
The mashed potatoes required a yellow Starburst butter pat, and caramel ice cream topping for gravy, but I was using candy that I scrounged from the girls’ 4th of July parade bags, and I didn’t have any yellow Starbursts, so I improvised by cutting a fun-sized banana Laffy Taffy in half. I also didn’t have caramel ice cream topping, but I did have butterscotch, and I figured that was close enough.
I tinted some frosting green (with a dash of yellow) for the veggie cupcake. The peas and carrots are supposed to be green M&Ms and orange Starbursts cut into quarters, but I didn’t have any M&Ms, so I used Skittles instead.
To make this whole “chicken dinner,” I bought only a can of frosting, and you should have seen the girls’ faces when I plunked these plates down in front of them and announced, “Here’s your lunch!”
I even let them eat lunch in their PJs, because I’m also the kind of Mom who doesn’t think it’s necessary to get dressed if we have nowhere to go.
According to them, I have now achieved “Coolest Mom Ever” status.
Please don’t forget to vote for my little cookie boy today!
