Kids in the Kitchen Wednesday: Fruit Roll Ups

It's no secret the Wisconsin Test Kitchen is obsessed with Pinterest. We've found some of our favorite recipes there; and we constantly turn to Pinterest for cooking inspiration. Yeah, it's that good. We recently saw a pin for homemade fruit roll ups that only called for two ingredients, and we had to give it a try.

Cool Dads Warning: this recipe literally takes all day. You're dehydrating fruit- it's going to take a while. Don't plan to use your oven for anything else for at least 5-6 hours.

Fruit Roll Ups

3 cups sliced strawberries
Sweetener of your choice (we went with honey, but white sugar or Steevia would work well too)

Pre-heat oven to 170 degrees. Line a jelly roll pan (a cookie sheet with edges) with plastic wrap. Sounds crazy, but trust us on this one.

Take 3 cups of sliced strawberries and add them to your food processor until they are pureed. Add sweetener until you get your desired level of um, sweetness. We just added a quick dollop of honey, and that worked fine for us.

Pour the strawberry puree onto the lined cookie sheet and carefully spread it out until it's about an 1/8th of an inch thick.

Now comes the time consuming process. Let the fruit bake for 5-6 hours on the lower-middle rack of your oven, or until the middle is set, and no longer "gooey". Here was our mistake: we let the fruit cook too long, and it ended up turning into "chips" instead of soft, pliable fruit roll ups. To quote one Cool Dad, "Fruit roll ups are not supposed to crunch in your mouth, unless you forgot to take the wrapper off".

Here's what our end product turned out like:

The final product was still delicious, it's just not a fruit roll up. It's more of a fruit tortilla chip. Our little sous chef still enjoyed them, and it's a quick way to get fruit into her diet, so I'm not complaining. We'll give this one another try soon, and hopefully end up with the desired finished product.

Any exciting recipes in your kitchen lately?

Stay Cool,
The Cool Dads Crew