Gingerbread is a baked treat that dates back to the Middle Ages. It is thought to have first appeared in the U.S. in the nineteenth century, when the Swiss monks of St. Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana baked gingerbread on holidays, and gave it to the sick.
Celebrating Christmas offers a potpourri of gingerbread house advice...
I'm trying really hard not to say "a picture is worth a thousand words," but if you are fishing for gingerbread inspiration, what better way to find it than at this collection of more than 600 gingerbread house photos?
To add a little computer fun to today's topic, this pick is an online game.
JustGingerbread.com is my pick of the week because of the simple printable patterns (in two sizes), abundance of building tips, and the illustrated step-by-step house assembly instructions.
This fourteen-page PDF from King Arthur Flour offers the most detailed gingerbread house building instructions I found online.
Whether you call it slime, flubber, oobleck, goo, goop, gak, gunk, ooze, putty, or play dough, we are talking about gooey, homemade polymers that can provide both hours of fun and an introduction to chemistry.
Despite the title, I don't think we're talking crafts for babies here, but rather toddlers and preschoolers.
Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D. is About.com's chemistry guide. But you don't need a Ph.D. to follow her recipes for a bouncing polymer ball, electroactive slime, fake snot (eww!), Metamucil flubber, or glow-in-the-dark slime.
Non-Newtonian fluids sometimes behave like liquids and sometimes like solids, thereby defying easy categorization.
Normally I visit Cooks.com for dinner recipes, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that they also house dozens of recipes for slime, silly putty, goop, and play dough.
The Slime we made is just a demonstration of how certain polymers are effected by other chemicals, such as 'cross-linkers' .