Lion Cupcakes

The topic for my lesson on Sunday was courage so I decided to bring Lion cupcakes. I gave an analogy about the physical courage of lions and compared it to spiritual courage.

Beehive Brownies

I thought I'd bring these beehive brownies for the young women on Sunday, since I am the beehive leader. 

Value Cupcakes

I brought these cupcakes to church a few weeks ago for the young women. I divided and tinted vanilla frosting with different colors of food coloring to match the young women values.

Secret Grandpa Activity

We had a "secret grandpa" activity for mutual that turned out to be a really fun activity. About a month before our activity the girls and leaders each selected a "secret grandpa" in the ward to honor. We started out by giving them a card that let them know that they had been selected as a secret grandpa. Then we gave them a small gift each week for four weeks. The picture below is an example of one of the gifts that I gave my secret grandpa. It is marshmallows on a skewer covered in chocolate. We invited them to a dinner prepared by the young women at the end of the four weeks.

The dinner was held at our young women presidents house. We made two different kinds of pasta - chicken Alfredo and spaghetti with meatballs. We served the pasta with garlic bread and provided juice as well. For dessert we had 3 different flavors of individual sized cheesecakes (mint chocolate, vanilla with strawberries, chocolate.)

Flower Cupcakes

Today I taught the lesson on the second coming in Young Women's and brought these flower cupcake treats for the girls. I got the flower cupcake liners as a gift from my Mom, but I have seen them at Michaels craft store too. I was lazy and bought a box of carrot cake mix and 2 cans of cream cheese frosting from the store to make the cupcakes. I used a 1M piping tip (looks like a star) and swirled the cream cheese frosting beginning in the center, so that it looked like a rose. You have to use a lot of frosting to make the rose design on top. I got many complements on how they looked and tasted. I think the girls are more excited about cupcakes than cookies.

CTR Cookies

It was my turn to teach in young women's last Sunday. The lesson was on prayer and sabbath day observance. I brought these CTR cookies as treats. For non-LDS readers, CTR means "choose the right." 

To make them -

1.) Add peanut butter and chocolate chips to a basic sugar cookie recipe. 

2.) trace a shield image onto card stock paper from your computer screen. Cut out the image. 

3.) Roll out cookie dough, place shield image on top of cookie dough and around it. 

4.) Bake cookies, let cool.

5.) Buy store bought vanilla frosting or make your own. Add green food coloring to 3/4 of container.

6.) Spread on green frosting thinly. Let dry.

7.) Snip the corner off of a bag and pipe on CTR letters. Or, use an exacto knife to cut out CTR letters on card stock. Place hallow CTR letters on top of cookie and spread white frosting over it (like your using a stencil.)

Mystery Dinner

We celebrated the graduating seniors in our young women's class for mutual a couple of weeks ago. A really neat lady had us over to her house for a mystery dinner. I had never been to one before and it turned out to be really fun.

When we got there we all sat at a large rectangular table. We were given a menu. The food items were listed in code. For example, one menu item was named "boxers best" and it turned out to be punch (juice). Another menu item was "Garden of Eden" and it was the code name for baked apple slices.

There were 5 courses and we selected the menu items we wanted served to us. Since we didn't understand most of the code names for food listed on the menu, we ended up getting served plates of food with funny combinations.

Oh...and did I mention that we had to order our silverware too from the coded menu? I actually got a pretty big kick out of watching people find creative ways to eat their food without silverware until they got some. One of the girls dipped her baked potato in butter and sour cream as she ate it.

The same girl got ice cream for her first course. Like her, I too received no silverware for my first course. I ended up using my crackers to scoop up and eat the jello and corn on my plate.

During dinner, we kept tyring to figure out what code names the food went with, because we couldn't remember all that we had ordered for each course.  At the end, our host told us what foods the code names on our menu were associated with.

When I got home I looked up more ideas for mystery dinners online. Some mystery dinner food ideas (code names and answers) can be found in the list above if you'd like to try this at home.