Fairy Bread vs the Third Grade

Fairy bread is a party treat from the antipodes. Crit wrote about it once already–you can read her take here. They (she included, as our down-under correspondent) serve it at kids’ parties in Australia and New Zealand. Basically, it’s buttered (usually crustless) white bread with sprinkles–they call them hundreds and thousands–on top. (It’s also big in the Netherlands, only the sprinkles there are called Hagelslag and are essentially exclusively served on buttered bread.) The Australian National Dictionary Centre cites a poem from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses as a possible source for the phrase.

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Fairy Bread

Come up here, O dusty feet!
Here is fairy bread to eat.
Here in my retiring room,
Children, you may dine
On the golden smell of broom
And the shade of pine;
And when you have eaten well,
Fairy stories hear and tell.

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As it happens, I have a young son who had a birthday party this month. He’s in the third grade and turned 9 just the other day.

Every year, he basically has the same birthday party. One to three of his buddies from school come over on a Saturday afternoon for around 3 hours, play videogames, demolish a couple of pizzas, and tear through as much cake and ice cream as we’ll feed them. I thought it might be fun to see if they could be distracted away from any of that with a tray of Fairy Bread. After securing my wife’s permission for the experiment, it was on.

I acquired 4 different kinds of sprinkles, including some chocolate ones from the baking bin in our pantry that may or may not have been past their sell-by date.

Fairy bread is having a bit of a moment on the internet currently according to mommy blogs and Pinterest, but one thing that I see them fail to do much of the time is cut the crusts off the bread. I’ve railed against the fancy-pants practice of cutting off bread crusts previously on the Tribunal, but it’s my understanding that this is a fairly vital part of proper fairy bread preparation. And to me it makes the final product more–festive? More dessert-like than sandwichy. More kid-friendly. So I cut the crusts off 8 pieces of white bread.

I spread each slice of bread with a good amount of butter (one side only!), filled plates with each type of sprinkles, and pressed the bread butter-side-down into the sprinkles until I got maximum coverage. Then I cut each slice in half (triangles, natch) and arranged them as neatly as my fat-fingered hands could manage on a serving tray.

There were the aforementioned chocolate sprinkles. There were “Blizzard” sprinkles, with regular shaped sprinkles in various shades of blue along with white snowflakes. There were some pastel star-shaped sprinkles. And there were the standard rainbow sprinkles.

I placed the tray of fairy bread on the kitchen table, along with the birthday cake, cheese and pepperoni pizzas, and a sack of chocolate chip cookies and 2-liter bottle of grape pop the pizza restaurant sent along for the birthday boy with their compliments. (Thanks, Kenootz!)

And then all I could do was wait. And by “wait” I mean “go to my local liquor store deli and order myself a 6 inch Italian sub.” (Verdict–the bread could have been better, and I should have asked what they meant when they asked “with everything?” but otherwise a decent example. Not sure I’ll get it again but glad I tried it.)

When I returned from getting my sandwich, the fairy bread had not been touched. Neither, for that matter, had the pizza or cake. The grape pop and cookies were half gone though, and the sounds of a furious Halo 3 deathmatch from the living room necessitated my withdrawal to the back of the house.

After a time, the energy of sugar-loaded nine year old boys could no longer be contained and they went outside (one benefit of a mild February) to ride bikes, play hide-and-seek, and eventually spill over into a nearby playground. I went into the kitchen to survey the damages.

The cookies and pop, obviously, had been the first casualty. But the pizza had evaporated, the cake had been ravaged, and the fairy bread… the tray was gone? What’s this?

The tray of fairy bread had been moved to the living room. It was sitting on the coffee table next to the abandoned game controllers.

I brought it back to the kitchen where the light was better, and snapped this shot.

They’d eaten nearly all of the fairy bread.

I asked later and found out that the fairy bread, though initially regarded with suspicion, had turned out to be a big hit among the partygoers. With everyone, that is, except the birthday boy himself. “I like the bread, and the sprinkles, but the butter just makes it weird,” he said.

“You know you need the butter to make the sprinkles stick to the bread?” I asked.

“I’d rather just eat straight sprinkles.” My boy is a logical one.

“I liked it,” his (normally) loud friend D¹ sheepishly reported. I tried to draw him out on the matter but his usually boisterously-expressed opinions seemed to have vanished that day. That was generally the case though. The boys seemed to enjoy it, but to be a little embarrassed by their enjoyment, or unable to articulate what they liked about it.

I can take a stab at it though. With the crusts cut off, it’s a very cakelike snack, but more portable than cake–you can hold a piece in one hand, taking bites, without worrying about dropping big chunks of it all over the floor (not that a 9yo cares about making a mess, but they do care about WASTING THAT CAKE) or getting frosting all over the place. Without worrying too much about anything but maybe getting a little butter on their faces or hands, on their laps or their game controllers. And not much butter at that, if the sprinkles coverage is good enough.

Which makes it a pretty perfect snack for a few energetic third-graders bouncing around on couches playing videogames.

I’m on board, mommybloggers. Let’s make fairy bread the Next Big Thing.

¹ I’ve been inconsistent about naming my children on this site–sometimes I’ll refer to them by their ages, sometimes I’ll use their actual names. But I’d probably better be more conscientious about other childrens’ names. D is my little guy’s best friend and never misses a chance to hang out.