Dessert Pizza
Looking for a healthy alternative for your preschoolers next birthday bonanza? Try out this surprisingly nutritious and wonderfully delicious dessert pizza!
What You Need:
- Pound cake
- Butter knife
- White frosting
- Various fruits
- Small candies and toppings
- Spatula
What You Do:
- Pull out your store-bought pound cake.
- With a butter knife, carefully cut out simple pizza topping shapes. (These can be as simple as pepperoni and olives or as elaborate as mushrooms and sliced bell peppers).
- Leaving said pizza impressions in the cake, find similar-looking fruit choices to match the molds.
- Sculpt your fruit choices accordingly if they do not properly fit their intended molds. (Examples of fruit to pizza topping molds you can use for this activity: banana slices for your pepperoni, grapes or blueberries for green and black olives, orange slices for tomato slices, etc.).
- Once sculpted, pair each fruit choice up into different stations with one or two less healthy cake topping choices. (Unhealthy cake topping choices can include hard candies, chocolate, sprinkles, marshmallows, cookies, etc.).
- Ensure that your unhealthy cake topping choices do NOT fit any of the molds on the cake.
- Once ready, pair your children up into two different teams.
- Place one child at each station and have them race to fill in their pizza molds. (To up the difficulty of this activity, assign different topping molds for each team to fill in).
- Upon completion of this relay race, allow the winners of the race to choose their slices of cake first.
- As soon as cake has been handed out to each child, allow them to finish decorating their cake slices with white or vanilla frosting (whichever you have on hand).
- Adults, be sure to help the children with this part of the activity if they are using knives to frost their cake pieces instead of rubber spatulas.
- Allow your children to dig in and enjoy a healthy fruit cake they made themselves as soon as their personalized pizza desserts are complete.
Kate is the founder of Learn and Grow Books, which is a website for parents and teachers of pre-K children.