jbrown-family: A New Tradition for New Year's Day

I follow several blogs from other mom's with young kids, one of which is called Catholic Icing. I really enjoy some of her projects because I like incorporating our Catholic faith into some fun teaching moments. So, when she posted this idea of celebrating the New Year with a St. Basil's jello cake, I thought it would be perfect. I mean, who doesn't love jello?!

I have to admit, that I did not realize that St. Basil's feast day is Jan 2 (so technically we should wait to eat the cake until the following day but yeah, that isn't ever going to happen), nor did I really know the story about St. Basil (good learning moment for mom and dad as well!).

The short version of the story is that St. Basil was helping the poor by collecting jewels from the rich to pay for the taxes of the poor (a little like Robin Hood but with no stealing). When St. Basil delivered the jewels, the tax collector was so moved that he didn't accept the jewels and told St. Basil to return them instead. The problem was he didn't know which jewels belonged to which person. So, he decided to be fair, he would bake them inside cakes. The miracle was that each person received the correct jewels!

A jello cake isn't exactly the traditional type of St. Basil's cake but it is kid friendly and it does look like jewels! So, I started by prepping the jello and letting that set up for several hours. Then we brought the trays of jello out for Garytt to help us cut up. (I'm not really sure if it was because he was getting tired or didn't understand what we were about to do, but he had a total meltdown at first.)

We eventually convinced him to calm down and explained that he was gonig to help cut up the jello...then he seemed cautiously interested.

Justin brought over the cookie cutter to help Garytt cut out the jello (we just thought that was safer than a knife). Garytt was pretty excited to do that part!

As we cut up the jello, we placed all the different colors into one pan. (I have to say at this point, I really didn't think the cake was going to turn out because the jello wasn't really staying in nice neat shapes.)

After we got most of the jello cut up, I put the filling in and put it in the refrigerator to set up.

Meanwhile, Justin was showing Garytt how to snack on the jello left in the pans.

Just one last bite before nap time!

Once the jello was completely set, I added the whipped topping. (Catholic Icing actually suggests home made whipped icing, but yeah, I wasn't feeling up to that, so we just have good old Cool Whip...ok, good old generic brand whipped topping.)