Family FECS: Don't Throw Away Your Sweet Wrappers

Saturday 17 August 2019

Don't Throw Away Your Sweet Wrappers

Don't throw away the store-bought fruit leather wrapper. Re-use it as a fanciful packaging for your homemade sweets and fruit leather.

It's essentially the same recipe as the edible playdough from my other post reproduced below for convenience:

Ingredients:

1. 10 (1/2 cup) dried dates pitted

2. 3 cup nuts and seeds (almonds, cashew nuts, walnuts, pecans, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, etc.)

3. 3 TBS cacao powder (optional)

Directions:

Using a blender, add in all the ingredients, blend on high until it is sticky enough to be formed/knead into a dough by hand (about 30 seconds to 1 minute). The dough shouldn't stick onto your hands. If necessary, repeat another cycle of blending after letting the blender rest for a minute.

I use the Magimix high-powered-blender, but any blender will do. So don't let the lack of a powerful blender discourage you from making your own healthy and nutritious fruit leather for your kids. You can also use a food processor. It will work equally well.

Storage:

1. Keeps in fridge for 2 weeks.

2. Also freeze well for future use :-)

Additional Information:

I am not sure how the culture is like in Singapore's kindergartens, but fruit leather is very popular snack with Danish kids' of Baby FECS' age in the Danish kindergartens.

Somehow things taste better and more fun in fanciful wrapper. Homemade fruit leather can be disguised in commercial wrapper, without the artificial coloring, favoring and preservatives, so that Baby FECS can still fit in with the other kids in the kindergarten, when she takes it out from her lunch box :-)

I also use it as a Montessori activity with my kids. While I roll it into shapes for the fruit leather for their lunch boxes, they play with a separate sample portion of the dough, trying to make their own shapes and creations. Their dough is discarded or eaten the same day, while the ones I made go into the freezer.

Here are the dried dates I use. I buy them from the Netto Supermarket and it costs 25 DKK per packet of 600 g. I think it is cheaper in Denmark than in Singapore, as the cost of living in Singapore seems to have increased a lot over the years.

Now it's ready to blend :-)

Blend on high for 30 seconds to one minute until it is sticky enough to be knead into a dough by hand. If need be, repeat another cycle of 30 seconds to one minute of blending.

Now it is sticky and of the right texture to form into a dough.

You can also make into shapes for kids by rolling the paste between two baking sheets. As the paste is very sticky, it is easier to roll it between two baking sheets.