Rainbow Parfaits for #Global Goals

It's true that sometimes I am overly ambitious. I know this. I claim that my life is too short to do one thing at a time, so I multitask to a ridiculous extent and manage to work in a poverty-fighting action or lesson into almost everything I do. Sometimes to great success. Other times...well, let me tell you the story of the End of the Rainbow Parfaits.

I was browsing through Pinterest one day with my eye out for a fun dessert I might make with my daughter and her friends for an upcoming slumber party. They'd been in a baking phase and I wanted to indulge them a bit. This is when I stumbled upon the End of the Rainbow Parfaits.

Photo from Tablespoon.com

Now, I know most moms wouldn't look at these delicious treats and say "Hey, that looks like a good lesson about the Global Goals!!!" But I'm weird and that's exactly what I thought. See, when I saw that picture, my mind when straight to this infographic...

The Global Goals for Sustainable Development, which I previously wrote about here, are 17 goals for the world that will help us do three things in the next 15 years: end extreme poverty, fight inequality and injustice, and fix climate change. It's up to us as global citizens to choose which ones we personally want to work on to get there. Each goal has a color in the graphic, so I thought that it would be neat to make these parfaits and allow kids to choose the color representing the issue they felt most strongly about. Only want to help "Life Below Water?" Cool. Yours can be all blue. I can never choose just one and like to work on global health (green), life under water (blue), clean water (light blue), education (dark red), and poverty in general (bright red).

I wanted to make these with my daughter's friends and give them the message that THEY get to choose in life what THEY want to work on. Too often, we just spoonfeed kid the idea that they have to do something and give them a something that we personally want to do. In real life, we have a choice.

In the middle of the prep, I got a call from my good friend Jennifer Burden, founder of World Moms Network. I told her I was getting kind of aggravated while I was getting ready for a slumber party and putting together the ingredients for this pretty ambitious dessert/craft. She said something like, "Do you ever just do anything just for fun?" I laughed and (joking-not-joking)said something like, "I don't think so. Please help me. It's a problem!" And it was! I was stressing out about the party anyway. I had no business trying to add a poverty lesson into the mix!!! Why was I pushing myself into an "Advocate to Aggravate" campaign?

Sigh. Well, Jen talked me into a better mood and we proceeded with the craft. Let's see how it went shall we?

STEP 1: Mix up refrigerated sugar cookie dough with eggs, vanilla, and food coloring. For simplicity, I did not make 17 different colors.

STEP 2: Spoon the colored batter into cupcake cups.

STEP 4: Bake 'em up! Use this baking time to explain the Global Goals to your helpers and tell them to think about what colors and goals they would like to work on.

STEP 5: Remove from oven and admire how well you are doing so far.

STEP 6: Crumble up the colored cupcakes into separate bowls.

STEP 7: Spoon in a chosen color, cover with whip cream, repeat until satisfied. And VOILA!

U

hmmm...okay, so they didn't EXACTLY turn out the way they looked on Pinterest, but on the whole I think we...

NAILED IT!

So, yeah. It turned out to be a laughable mess. We won't be doing this for any bar mitzvahs or anything, but the girls had fun and they got some global learnin' along the way. I was not sorry we tried!! If you try it, tell me how it goes!