July is National Ice Cream Month and we are here to celebrate!
Celebrate National Ice Cream Month with a Chopped Junior Challenge! When Prairie Farms reached out to partner and feature their small batch ice cream pints, we said “heck yes”. You don’t have to ask us twice to celebrate ice cream! They are now featuring 12 delicious flavors in a convenient pint size! Cookies ‘N Cream, Strawberry Shortcake, Caramel Praline Pecan, and The Hill (pistachio ice cream) are just a few of our favorite flavors.
Prairie Farms
Prairie Farms is a farmer owned dairy cooperative of about 700 farm families who live and work all over the midwest, including Wisconsin. Their products go from farm to shelf in 48 hours. We love that the food we buy is locally sourced and fresh! They make yogurt, cottage cheese, ice cream, flavored milks, cream cheese, and sour cream. They also have squeezable sour cream… and you know how we feel about that. Our favorite place to get Prairie Farms here in Wisconsin is at Woodman’s.
Chopped – A Fun Activity for Kids
When we started thinking about creative and fun ways to share these great little pint-sized treats with all of you, we knew we wanted to involve the kiddos! We thought it would be fun to recreate an episode of “Chopped”. Have you seen it? Katie rounded up some neighbor kids to each create an ice cream masterpiece! We love that you can honestly make this as simple or complex as you’d like. A lot of how you will decide to run your competition will depend on where it’s taking places, how many kids you plan on including and their ages!
Here is how it works:
1. Prepare the mystery ingredient bags
For every kid that you have participating, they will need a bag of goodies for their creations. You can use what you have around the house or you can run to the store for fun and crazy toppings! Katie did a little bit of both! The bags she created had six items. They all had one pint of Prairie Farms ice cream (all different flavors) and then five other mystery ingredients.
Ingredient/topping ideas: fruit, whipped cream, jelly beans, sprinkles, cookies, chips, graham crackers, candy, cones… you get the idea! You can even give each kid something odd to make it fun and more challenging – tortillas, jelly, seaweed crisps, beef sticks, etc. Some items didn’t come in individual packages, so I just used some ziplock bags. It worked just fine!
One of the most exciting parts for the kids was opening up the bags and seeing what they got and then looking around to see what everyone else got as well!
2. Number the Bags and have the kids pick numbers out of a hat
Once the bags are prepared and numbered, each kid picks a number out of a hat and receives the corresponding bag and heads to their work station. Katie put two 6ft tables in her garage lined with eight paper plates for the eight kids participating. It does not need to be fancy!
3. Decide on the rules and make sure the kids understand them.
Because it was an incredibly hot night and she decided to do their competition in the garage and they were dealing with ice cream, they had to make it fast! Everyone got three minutes to create their ice cream masterpiece, but they ended up giving the kiddos a bonus minute because they were not done. They were very appreciative! lol
There were a few rules in our game:
- They were allowed to trade one ingredient with another participant, but only if agreed upon by both.
- They had to use all six of their ingredients.
- Thy could approach the parent panel of judges or the cutting station if they needed help opening up a container or cutting something. (Rookie mistake: Katie didn’t open up all the ingredients prior, therefore the panel of judges were put to work! They had some younger participants, ages 3 & 4, who needed a some extra help and guidance!)
4. Set the Timer and Let the fun begin!
After the timer goes off, it’s time to judge the ice cream masterpieces! Each child is judged on taste, creativity, and presentation by their parents. You can do this any way you would like. Each parents (or decided on set of judges) gives each kid a score from 1-5 in each category. The kid with the highest score in each category wins that category!
If you really want to get into it, you could even create fun trophies or prizes!
(In full transparency, Katie completely skipped the judging and just had each kid explain their ice cream creation. It was an incredibly hot night and they really just wanted to get to eating their ice cream! Like I said, they had some very little participants!)
2022 UPDATE: This year we did NOT skip the judging because the kids really wanted some good old fashioned competition! haha! We just so happened to have Laura Musekamp, owner of Lola Kate’s Kitchen and runner up of the Hallmark Channel’s Christmas Cookie Matchup – season 1, as our guest judge this year! How cool is that?! Each child was then given a spoon to give Laura the best sample of their ice cream sundae! Laura picked the winner of the best tasting creation and all the parents got to vote on the best presentation and the most creative! Also, with 9 kids with a mystery bag of 7 ingredients, this activity cost us a little over $100.
THE MAIN GOAL: HAVE FUN!
The goal is really to just have fun! If you have older kids, you can get more creative, but this would be a fun activity if you’re having friends over or even for a birthday party activity. The kids all had a blast and it was the perfect activity for a hot summer night!
So there you have it! That’s how you Celebrate National Ice Cream Month with a Chopped Junior Challenge! We also did a blog post last month featuring Prairie Farms cream cheese spreads and included another fun idea to try with kids. Let us know if you try either of these and what your kiddos think1
