Silly Cakes

PDG and MDG both love to play on J-Man's and my phones. Maybe we shouldn't let them? I don't know. Regardless, they do. They used to love to scroll through photos of themselves. Then they moved on to some toddler apps that teach colors and numbers and the stuff that you're not supposed to expect a device to teach them, but in reality what can a little screen-reinforcement hurt on the topic? Sometimes they make their way to Netflix for some Daniel Tiger, Super Why, Chuggington or even occasionally the short-lived and intense Russian series Masha's Tales.

And also, as I've probably mentioned before, they love youtube. The thing about youtube is it remembers what you've watched before, and gives you suggestions. If, heaven forbid, I've watched a grown-up video (don't think badly of me here, I'm talking the soundtrack to Last Five Years, or the video for Bieber's Love Yourself or anything else that doesn't feature puppets or nursery rhymes) the boys get upset wanting to know where their videos are and insisting I get back to those bright and animated suggestions.

But once the suggestions pop up, especially when MDG takes the lead, it's a rapid fire roulette of clips. One video leads to another, to another, often with none of them being finished, until they land on either a) something they love or b) something they've explicitly been told to avoid. Again, don't go to bad places with this. I'm talking videos of people opening toys or eggs and showing how they work. Somewhere in the world millions of children or adults are watching these videos, but they are strictly prohibited in the G household. Want to know how toys work? Go play with any of the ones currently sitting stagnant in either of the giant toyboxes we own.

So, anyway, one day the boys got really quiet - never a good sign - and when J-Man and I realized they were watching what must've been an off limits video, we checked it out. Sure enough, it was someone explaining how something worked. Only the product wasn't in English packaging. And it wasn't a toy. It was Japanese gummy sushi candies. PDG explained that they were silly cakes, and the name stuck.

Also, surprise surprise, J-Man decided he had to get his hands on this treat. He went to the always trustworthy Amazon, ordered some silly cakes from Japan, and we waited the weeks for them to arrive.

They were a success. The boys loved them. It was daddy son bonding time. And apparently they taste good to grown-ups too. Plus, with the magic of youtube, we knew we could find videos in English of how the whole thing works.

Since then we've ordered them twice more, and the boys love making silly cakes with daddy. There's measuring and mixing and near chem-lab precision, and in the end, a tiny tasty treat. Highly recommended.

And, for my one Texas friend who will have any idea what I'm talking about, making these is like mashing together memories of our Thursdays in NYC at Wasabi Lobby and that Tasti D-Lite with all the gummies by the pound. Now all we need is a way to incorporate Grey's Anatomy and its decline into whine central...