CREATE YOUR OWN BUGGY CRACKER SNACKS

 

Bug Week would not be complete without some buggy snacks. I was originally inspired by this recipe by Taste of Home for Ladybug Appetizers. It is summer time though, so my fridge was full of fresh and yummy produce. I am fortunate to have a kiddo that LOVES fruits and veggies, so I decided to mix the cracker snacks up a bit and create different "bugs" using things I already had in my fridge. 

For the base of the buggy cracker snacks I used Ritz crackers with either peanut butter or cream cheese. I searched the fridge and collected the following: grape tomatoes, cherries, half of a cucumber, olives, snap peas, cut-up cantaloupe, half of a banana and some grapes. Once we had a pile of foodstuff on the counter I started to cut up the fruit into small, buggy parts per Maggie's suggestions. This is what our counter looked like when done:

I let the kiddo have at the scraps; she also asked if she could suck the black frosting out of the tube. That was a definite NO. You will noticed it is removed in the picture below. 

The final products turned out even better than expected! I did most of the "bug creation" based on the child's suggestions due to time constraints. 

I think they all turned out adorable (with the exception of the creepy, Dark Knight-esque Joker bug on the right). I used cherry stems and sugar snap pea strings for the antennas. Maggie suggested those as antennaes and they worked perfectly. I also added some eyes (cream cheese and black frosting put on with a toothpick, tedious would be a good work to use). Here are some close-ups of our favorites:

 

Maggie could not WAIT to eat them. I may have booted her upstairs while I was trying to get some pictures because she kept trying to grab one. Once I had the needed pics, I got her a glass of milk and let her munch away on the buggy snacks. The only one she did not eat was the lady bug; she does not like olives. I did though and it was DELICIOUS (even with the kind of weird flavor profile of black frosting). Below is a picture of her trying to decide if she should eat the antenna of not.

These buggy snacks are a great way to get your child to try a variety of fruits and veggies. I think another great idea would be to serve these as party food; you could have the buggy parts prepped before and let kids create their own. This snack was fun to make and fun to eat, as evidenced below.