The Year of Color {Pink} Edition

February is filled with all things love, and hearts, and red, and PINK! So, this month's Year of Color was devoted to pink!

I knew instantly where I wanted to head to snap a few photos with my babes this month. It wasn't even a question, I had to get to this spot.

If you saw the Wall Crawl - LA Love post a couple days ago I hinted at this wall, but I wanted to wait to share it today.
After Scott so kindly snapped a few pics of the kids and me I was able to convince him to jump in some shots as well. After seeing Scott with the kids, I think he should make cameos more often!
Marcus asked to try his hand at taking photos, so I passed the camera over and he started snapping away.  Marcus took the last picture of Scott, Julia, and me. Minus Scott's impeccable ability to spice up a photo, Marcus did a pretty good job!
The infamous pink Pall Smith wall can be found at 8221 Melrose Avenue.

After the pink photo op I did a little digging to read, bake, experiment, and craft with pink as our primary influence.

READ

Thanks to Julia's growing library, we had Pinkalicious on hand. I was initially worried Marcus would find the story "too girly," but he thoroughly enjoyed reading all about pink cupcakes.

BAKE

When I stumbled upon strawberry chocolate chip cookies I knew we had a winner. Not only was the recipe so easy Marcus could help whip them up, they were also mighty tasty. I had two little ones who couldn't have agreed more.

Recipe from Sally's Baking Addiction

Strawberry Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 box strawberry cake mix

1 tsp baking powder

2 large eggs

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1 and 1/4 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350F. Line baking sheet with parchment paper.

In large bowl, mix together cake mix and baking powder. Set aside. In a smaller bowl, whisk eggs, oil and vanilla by hand. Add egg mixture to cake mixture and stir to form dough. Stir vigorously until all of the pockets of dry cake mix are gone. Gently mix in chocolate chips.

Drop rounded balls of dough (about 2 Tbsp) onto prepared baking sheet. Make sure balls of dough are taller than they are wide.

Bake for 10 minutes. Do not let the cookies get brown. Allow to cool on baking sheet for 3 minutes - they will be very soft at first. As they cool, tops may settle down. Transfer to wire rack to cool completely.  

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EXPERIMENT

Pink flubber! Remember that gak, flubber stuff that was cool circa 1990? It was right there along side the silly putty and what not. Well, we attempted a super easy recipe and made our own.

Marcus helped with about 80% of the creation of the flubber. Julia tried several times to eat the flubber, and failed miserably with each attempt. The entertainment of the flubber lasted about as long as it took to make the stuff, but it was fun to see it all come together and try make bodily noises with it in a shot glass (just a heads up, we were not able to successfully make one single fart noise).
Flubber
1/2 cup white glue
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/4 cup hot water
1/2 tsp Borax
Food coloring (we used 6 drops of red)
Mix 1/2 cup glue and 1/4 cup cornstarch in a glass bowl. Add food coloring and mix again.
In a separate bowl, mix 1/4 cup hot water and 1/2 tsp Borax until it is dissolved. 
Add it to the glue mixture and stir again.
Get your hands in there to mix and work the flubber until it is no longer sticky.

CRAFT

This one was super simple, fast and easy, as any paint craft should be when it involves an 18-month old.

I know you wipe some away, but these prints were made to stay.
So keep them forever, a treasure they will be.
A special, "I love you."
For you, from me.

I had Marcus use a lighter pink to create the large heart with his hand prints. Once that was dried I wrangled Julia up and used a darker pink to create the smudgy mess in the middle using her hand prints. Once everything was dry I added the little saying to the bottom of the prints and mailed them off to the grandparents for Valentine's Day! Nothing too fancy, but full of sentiment and love.

Phew! That wraps up February's PINK prompt! If you've joined in the fun this month be sure to drop your link below so we can see how pink has inspired you.

Next month the color prompt is GREEN. We'll be linking up on Friday, March 17 - St. Patrick's Day!

An InLinkz Link-up

Flubber source: Paper Tape & Pins
Strawberry Chocolate Chip Cookie source: Sally's Baking Addiction