Barbados Unit

And now we come to the second of the iconic island nations in the iconic Beach Boys song: Barbados. And yes if you are wondering that song is now going through my head and I will be linking to a video of it, so it can go through your head too. I am that mature. But, let’s get serious and see what we’ll do for our Barbados Unit, in our geography lesson and part of the overall North America Unit.

(there are affiliate links in here)

Barbados Unit resources

All right, let’s get to the various resources I found for Barbados. The only children’s books my library had were novels, and so we’ll just head over to the internet to see what fun facts I can find:

• Key facts from Barbados
• Facts for kids
• 15 vaguely incredible facts– did you know they have beaches? This is just one of the fun facts you can leave

I mean look at that picture, aren’t those gorgeous beaches?

But, let’s get our Geography Now video.

Oh gosh, I forgot the puns in the first 30 seconds, so many puns. I just want to point out there is no blood of the martyrs on this flag. Yes, it greatly amuses me whenever that happens.

Barbados unit recipe: Sweet Bread

Okay, I found this site that had a recipe and it looked decent, but I was halfway through making the recipe when I discovered they did not give me some key instructions:

• There is no temperature for baking
• There is no time to cook the bread

So I made it up, and I was close, but not quite correct in my guess. So any problems with how it tasted were from my incorrect guesswork.

Sweet Bread ingredients

• 2/12 cups grated coconut
• 1/2 cup melted butter
• 4 cups flour
• 1 tablespoon shortening
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 1/4 cup evaporated milk
• 1 teaspoon almond extract
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

How it went cooking it

Okay, the recipe card has the correct information with how it should ideally be cooked. I’ll update the card when I make it again if I’m wrong on my guess on the updated cooking time.

• Read the recipe through and realize at no point does this recipe ever give you a temperature to bake the bread at. Arbitrarily decide to cook it at 425 because that’s what other bread recipes are baked at.
• In a bowl mix together the baking powder, salt, and flour. Realize after the fact that you probably could have skipped this step and saved a dirty bowl you have to wash.
• Start measuring the coconut. Discover the bag of coconut you were sure you had for this recipe has been used for lunches to make sandwiches. Start rifling through the cabinets and throw in any bit of coconut you can find. This is not an auspicious start. Mix in the sugar, at least you have enough of that.
• Now mix together the egg, milk, almond extract, vanilla extract, and melted butter. Stare at the recipe and realize that while it says shortening, you never add the shortening in. (Ticia typing right now goes to adjust the recipe card, as she adjusted that she realized it never says anywhere in the recipe how much vanilla extract to add, randomly says 1 teaspoon).
• Add in the egg, milk, almond extract, vanilla extract, and melted butter. Mix all that together and then add in the flour mixture.
• Grease your pans. Start splitting the bread into loafs, mistakenly think “There’s no yeast in there, it shouldn’t rise much.” Split it into two very full loaves and one partially full loaf.
• Shove the dough into the oven and listen to the recipe saying cook for one hour.
• Pull the bread out to discover, the two full loaves of bread have overflowed, and look like mutated mushrooms, and that one that was only half full looked like a good loaf of bread.
• Also notice that the tops of all loaves of bread are burned. It probably should have been cooked for a good 15 minutes less.
• Eat the not burned portions and thoroughly enjoy the food with some nice butter added on.

Sweet Bread

Print

This dense sweet bread is a lightly sweet desert from Barbados.

Prep Time 15 minutes

Cook Time 30 minutes

Total Time 45 minutes

Ingredients

• 2/12 cups grated coconut
• 1/2 cup melted butter
• 4 cups flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 1/4 cup evaporated milk
• 1 teaspoon almond extract
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Instructions

1. Mix the coconut and the sugar together in a bowl. Then add the egg, milk, almond extract, vanilla extract, and melted butter. Mix until you have a creamy paste.
2. Add the flour, baking powder, and salt to the mixture. Mix until you form a stiff dough.
3. Grease the pans, then divide the mixture between loaf pans. Fill the loaf pans to about 1/2-2/3 full.
4. Bake in over at 425 for 45 minutes. Check to see if bread is done and golden brown on top, if not allow to cook for a few more minutes.

Barbados unit notebooking pages

We grabbed the North America notebooking pages and started filling it out.

I just realized I never filled out any landforms. That is crazy.

Here are my fun facts. Random note, I’m going through my country notebooking and adding it into my fun facts I share on social media.

• Somehow most hurricanes miss Barbados
• George Washington visited Barbados, I wonder when he had time to do that?
• They have a flying fish on their passport.
• Unlike pretty much every other Caribbean country, it has ONLY ONE ISLAND, that’s right, ONE!

Whew, now this post that’s been sitting in draft is done.

Finally.

More great geography fun

• Fun Ways to Use Maps with Kids
• Vietnam Unit
• How to memorize the continents
• Somalia Unit
• Geography Gameschooling

“barbados” by scaturchio is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.