Today was the first day of the school summer holidays and I had big plans for my day with Mook and Lulu – sadly, the day didn’t go quite as planned…

An emergency visit to my dentist, on-the-spot extraction of a wisdom tooth (no one was more surprised than me!), and phantom banana-muncher, all put paid to our plans for some hawaiian-style holiday fun, well some of our plans.

I’d decided we would have a go at making watermelon sea turtles and try a great new recipe for banana and coconut bread.

Understandably, after suffering a mummy who was suffering all morning, then losing a couple of hours at the dentist, all Mook and Lulu really wanted to do this afternoon was play hide-and-seek in the park.  After the park, and the inevitable trip to the supermarket (or two) we eventually returned home, just before teatime, to start our holiday fun.

So, Coconut and Banana bread – we had scoured the shelves in search of the most unusual ingredient on the list – coconut oil.  To my amazement, and some cost, we found it at our second supermarket.  Confident we had all the other ingredients, I sent the girls to wash their hands.  Wait a minute! Where were my bananas?

A phone call to hubby at work and the mystery was solved (to add insult to injury he informs me he was eating one of the stolen bananas while talking to me on the phone!).

Okay, watermelon sea turtles it is then…

Bending to the consensus, watermelon sea turtles became watermelon tortoises (Mook loves tortoises) and so I took my knife to our freshly purchased watermelons.

As we were now making tortoises I cut the watermelons in half and then cut into the skin and flesh to leave the four legs and a tail.

Next Mook and Lulu drew their designs on the ‘shells’ of the tortoises and I set about scoring the skin over their designs.  Depending on the implements you use, and how confident you feel about your kids using those tools, you could let your kids do this bit themselves.  I was using a knife and nail file and so decided it was best if I helped my girls with their tortoise transformation.

Once scored, I used some of the melon offcuts to make the head for each of the tortoises, and as you can see Mook and Lulu were delighted with their new ‘edible pets’.

As for the Coconut & Banana bread, we’ll be trying that at the weekend.

Do you have any other interesting variations on Banana bread?  I’d love to hear about them.

Tagged: banana bread, coconut, Hawaiian-style, Lulu, Mook, party ideas, sea turtles, summer holiday fun, things for kids to make, tortoises, watermelon