It's the end of the world as we know it.....

......okay, maybe not. But when we were making these 'earth snacks', I was saying to Cindy that they might not come out exactly as planned (since we'd never tried this before) but it wasn't the end of the world if they didn't go quite right.... but, umm...well... ha. *grin*

We've been reading about how the earth is made up of various 'layers' - like this - and, as Friday is often our cooking/baking day, we decided to make a snack that related to this... an edible earth! :-)

Our edible earth has the crust, the mantle (upper & lower, though they aren't defined), the outer core, and the inner core...I know that you can get a lot more technical and we did discuss things like the transitional zone, but for the edible earth we just stuck to the basics...

There's a picture on the site that I linked, but that's boring. Wouldn't you rather see the real thing - even if it didn't turn out perfect? *grin*

This is what you need:



I don't have pictures of every single step, as we were both up to our elbows in sticky marshmallow & peanut butter at various points and I was not getting THAT all over my camera :-P ...but here's a few...

Cherries getting stuffed into the marshmallows....



Rest of the marshmallows melting in a pot with a little butter...



Marshmallows mixed in with rice crispies...just like you were making rice crispy squares..



The next step is to pack the rice crispy mix around the marshmallow & cherry, having the marshmallow & cherry right in the center of the ball....so that you end up with something that looks like this:



Then you take the balls and you spread peanut butter all over them..




..once they're covered with the peanut butter, you roll them in crushed chocolate chip cookies..





...resulting in something that looks like this:



Now, when you cut your 'earth' in half, you get a tasty representation of what's inside the earth ----- and you also learn something. You learn that if you pack the rice crispy mix around the marshmallow/cherry lightly and leave it sitting, it will lose it's shape and look kinda odd. Told ya it didn't go perfectly! *grin*

We grabbed the other ones and packed them together tighter and they kept their shape for us, but this one is funny looking. You get the idea though! ;-)



They were a lot of fun to make - extremely messy & sticky, but fun! - and yummy..only thing I would try to change is to make them smaller... they're the size of softballs! That's an awful big snack - we're just kinda picking away at them and may pawn a couple of them off on my mother. *grin*