The Daring Book for Girls - Andrea J. Buchanan [84]
Shortbread
1 cup of sugar
1 cup of butter (equals two sticks, or ½ pound)
3 cups of all-purpose flour
Preheat the oven to 275 degrees. Cream the sugar and butter. Measure in 2½ cups of flour, and mix thoroughly. Flour a tabletop, counter, or wooden board with the leftover ½ cup of flour, and knead until you see cracks on the dough’s surface. Roll out the dough to ¼ inch thick, and cut into squares, bars, or any shape you wish. With a fork, prick the cookies, and put them on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for 45 minutes, until the tops are light brown. You can also add almonds, hazelnuts, or chocolate chips to the dough if you like.
Fudge
2 packages, or 16 squares, of semi-sweet baking chocolate
1 can of sweetened condensed milk, the 14-ounce size
1 teaspoon vanilla
Melt the chocolate with the condensed milk, either in a microwave for 2-3 minutes, or on top of the stove. The chocolate should be almost but not entirely melted. Stir, and the chocolate will melt fully. Add vanilla. Line a square pan (8 inches is a good size) with wax paper, and pour in the chocolate-milk-vanilla mixture. Chill for two hours or more if needed, until firm. Cut into bars or squares.
CALCULATING YOUR PROFIT
If you are working your lemonade stand to save up dollars for a Swiss Army knife or a special book, you must understand how to figure out how much you earned—that is, your profit. Let’s say you make the expanded-version lemonade stand. From the sale of lemonade, fudge, and three Beanie Babies, you earned $32.
First figure the profit, using this standard equation:
Revenue (money taken in) minus Expenses (food, drink, etc.) equals Profit
Revenue: You sold 30 cups of lemonade and 20 pieces of fudge, charged 50 cents for each item and earned $25. Plus, someone paid you $7 for those Beanie Babies your great aunt brought for your second birthday. At the end of the day you took in $32.
Expenses:
3 cans of frozen lemonade 2.50
38 plastic cups 1.50
fudge ingredients 2.00
Total Expenses 6.00
Now plug the numbers into the equation: 32 minus 6 equals 26. You cleared $26 in profit.
How to Paddle a Canoe
THERE ARE LARGER, faster and more complex boats than a canoe, kayak, or raft, but in none of those fancier boats can you feel the water so closely, touch the mussels that cling tight in willow shoals, or slip into creeks and shallow wetlands to drift silently alongside cormorants, osprey, and swan.
Paddling a boat is an art that, like most pursuits, just needs practice to master. Huck Finn may have floated the Mississippi on a raft, and white-water kayaking is a thrill, but short of those, nothing beats a canoe for a water adventure.
Sometimes you need to be alone, and your canoe is there for you. Other times you want to adventure with a friend, and canoeing together is an exhilarating lesson in teamwork.
To learn to canoe, you should know these basic boat words, strokes, and concepts.
The ordinary canoe stroke is the forward stroke. To paddle on the right, grab the grip (or top knob of the paddle) with your left hand, and the shaft with your right. Put the paddle into the water, perpendicular to the boat, and pull it back and then out of the water. Keep your arms straight and twist your torso as you paddle. To paddle on the left, hold the grip with your right hand, the shaft with your left, and repeat.
To change course and return from whence you came, turn the boat, and then paddle forward in the new direction. The back stroke, then, merely causes the boat to slow, or even stop. Put the paddle in the water slightly back, near the line of your hips, and pull toward the front, and then out.
It’s important to remember that a canoe is not a bicycle. If you turn bicycle handlebars to the right, the bike will turn rightward. Not so in a canoe. When you paddle to the right, the boat will shift left. The opposite is true, too: left paddling pushes the boat to the right. Rotate your body as you paddle, since the power comes not from your arms, exactly, but