Baking Through the Alphabet: The Letter W

My mom was visiting this weekend because Thanksgiving didn't work out and Christmas won't either, so we got a little bit of time together for about 5 days.  She really wanted to watch White Christmas with us but my kids really wanted to see Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, so, you know, Grandma is in town, so we just watched both!  Which meant that we had to skip over most of the alphabet to focus on "W".

The Letter W:

Letter W Meal:

• Weiswurst
• Wild Rice
• Watermelon (Remember in Lady and the Tramp, when the wife is pregnant and she asked her husband to go to the store to get watermelon?  It's one of my favorite parts because he leaves the house during a blizzard so the likelihood of him finding watermelon in winter, in the Victorian era was next to none.  As a mom, who has had crazy cravings, I love that part!  Luckily, we live today and it wasn't too hard to find watermelon.  
• Water to drink

Baking With the Letter "W":  Waffles

For our baking project, we made my favorite waffles for this time of year.  Normally I love waffles made with cornstarch substituted for part of the flour.  The cornstarch makes the waffles crispy on the outside and soft and delicious on the inside.  (Here we made a mix for cornstarch waffles - so yummy!)

The waffles made for W were actually gingerbread flavored, complete with molasses, cinnamon, cloves and, of course, ginger.   The smell in the house is amazing!  The recipe called for separated eggs and making the yolks fluffy and the whites to have stiff peaks.  That was a new thing for my lil' gal.

 Mixing the dry ingredients together.

 Beating the eggs and brown sugar until they were fluffy (we doubled this recipe, so it took 2 eggs instead of the one called for in a single recipe).

 Making stiff peaks in our egg whites.

 Melted butter with this amazing contraption from Tupperware.  It keeps your butter from splattering all over the microwave.  Love it!  (I don't get anything from Tupperware, I just love this product of theirs and thought I'd share.)

 I like to freeze.  They make THE BEST frozen-to-toaster waffles!  And like I mentioned above, the house will smell amazing and festive!

We like to put applesauce on our gingerbread waffles.  But they taste great with syrup and butter too.  

Letter W Musicals: (* = ones that are , in my opinion, decent or fun to watch; ** = kid friendly; *** = the one we watched for our alphabet musical)

  

• Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory***
• White Christmas ***
• The Wizard of Oz **
• Winnie the Pooh Movies**
• West Side Story *
• Wicked *     

My kids LOVE Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  They like how good the boy Charlie is, the fun songs and the funny things that happen in the show.  

White Christmas is just a classic.  Both my kiddos had a hard time watching my favorite song "Count Your Blessings" because the movie is a tad slow there, but overall it was a winner.  

We watched The Wizard of Oz for [their] first time this summer.  When I was a kid, I remember thinking that it was the longest movie ever!  But it's really not that long.  And the 13 and 11 year olds liked it a lot. 

While we haven't watched any of the Winnie the Poohs lately, when my kids were much, much younger, they loved them!  And I loved watching them with them!  

I put West Side Story on here because it is a good musical.  I think it would be fun to take my kids to a stage version.  

I just saw Wicked for the first time a few months ago.  It was great!  I would definitely take my kids to see it in a theater, but it did mess with the whole Wizard of Oz ideal and that was tricky for me to get around.  But it was cool to see the "wicked witch's" side of the story.