Monday 4 June 2012

Rainbows and rain clouds

It's a bit of a gray, dreary day.  Rainy, windy and cool too. 
I made a few batches of rainbow rice and tomorrow morning we will eat rainbow waffles.

Waiting for the cover to come down.

What a blast tomorrow will be!  Sensory play with rainbow rice!  My kids are gonna freak out!  They may even spend time playing with it!  !

I'm going to start us off with rainbow waffles.  I've never done it before and I'm fairly certain they'll be pastels and not nearly as bright as the waffles in this link where I got the idea, I just can't imagine all that food colouring all at once!

Colours are barely discernable when baked toasty brown but I'm not complaining about a
gorgeous brown waffle on my plate!

If you look carefully, you can make out the different colours.


Basic Waffles (rainbows are optional)
from my Cuisinart waffle maker handbook
2 cups flour
2 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 3/4 cup milk
1/3 cup oil
2 large eggs
splash vanilla
liquid food colouring (optional)
- mix dry in big bowl.  Mix wet in small bowl.  Add wet to dry and mix well.
- divide into smaller bowls and to each bowl add food colouring to reach effect desired.
- spread a bit of each colour combo onto your hot waffle iron to fill.  Lower top and cook as directed.

You can make swirls, stripes, zig zags, spirals, let your imagination run wild!  Let your kids tell you what to do with it.  You can even put sprinkles on the batter just before you close the lid if you like.  Or blueberries.

Just a little too full on the first try - but nice and fluffy!

Tell me how it goes if you try it.



Before the attack of the wees.

I messed it up just a bit for this photo, I couldn't resist.

EDIT the next morning: the rice was attacked, played with for a minute and then spread all over the house.  I don't mind so much, it's easy to clean up.  My concern was adding water to the mix with all that food colouring and staining the floor.  Next time, I will just be doling out plain white rice not coloured to play with.  The waffle mixes looked cool, but once cooked were pretty much a uniform toasty brown colour.  You could see the pink and blue if you knew they were there and looked hard.  Once opened to eat though, the colours were obvious and fun.  I'll do it again.


There we are, all four of them still in their pj's. They LOVED it!

8 comments:

  1. Super fun idea! I'm going to color our pancake batter and make mini colorful pancakes and stack them. Thanks for the inspiration.

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    1. And at around the halfway mark of making the waffles, I dumped the colours into one bowl and did not stir. This created a swirly effect right up until the end of the batter. It was fun and this would make a good pancake recipe too.

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  2. My first reaction was...yuck..all that food coloring. I recently, with a niece-in-law, made a birthday cake for Cyede decorated with a red car. The icing was bitter because of the food coloring and had to add extra vanilla. My niece who has cake decorating certificates said that is common... did you notice a difference in the taste of the waffles? I think the rainbows are pretty... just wish there was a different way to color them... maybe raspberry, grape and blueberry juice?

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    1. Well, mine weren't nearly as bright, just pastel-y. I used 12 drops of each colour in a double batch of this recipe, it was pretty faint. I think using a fruit juice or beet juice would work really well, thanks for THAT idea! Even the rice I made was not dramatice but the kids loved the colours anyway.

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  3. Hey,M
    It's C.
    That looks deliche.

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    Replies
    1. "C" like my Big Kid? HI!!!!!!!! HAving fun Out West?

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  4. You can get natural food color I just don't know where. Am going to look into it.

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    Replies
    1. Oh! I'd feel so much better about this if the colours were from veggies and fruit. I have done no research into what food colouring is, but I don't like using a lot of it, that's for sure. I don't know how unnatural it is, but it is unnecessary.

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