Honey I Shrunk Movie Night (#101)

April's film was Honey I Shrunk The Kids. In this movie, an eccentric inventor builds a machine that accidentally shrinks his children. They then get lost in the backyard and have to find their way back to dad in hopes of being restored to their normal size.

For this film, the dessert was pretty obvious. In the film, there is an iconic scene where they come across a giant Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pie. As a kid, this scene was a thing of dreams. Once I realized we were making this movie, I knew that I had to do my best to recreate it. Of course, mine wouldn't be quite as big as theirs, but I would make it as big as I possibly could.

For dinner, I played around with a few ideas. In the film, there are references to strawberry milkshakes, corndogs, and mall food, so that could have potentially been the theme. Another option would have been a Thanksgiving dinner, because the film also has a scene with the family sitting around a table with a giant turkey, while the dog eats a giant milkbone.

Ultimately, I decided that it would be fun to counter the giant dessert with a tiny meal. Because a large part of the film takes place in the backyard, I was planning to host this party in the backyard with us watching the movie with my projector. A backyard meal is a perfect setting for a cook out, so I decided to make mini burgers and fries.

Giant Little Debbie Creme Pie

Creating the recipe was very trial and error. I wanted to make it as authentic as possible. The first step to this was to buy a box of the real Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies. I used the ingredient list on the back of the box to figure out what ingredients make up the majority of the dish. Then, I started testing some recipes I found online by making super small batches and testing the flavor against the ones from the box. After tweaking those recipes, I feel like I got extremely close to the real flavor. The cookie is practically an exact match. The marshmallow cream is probably tastier than the original though. This recipe uses the same ingredients found in the boxed version after ignoring preservatives, food coloring, and ingredients labeled as less than 2%. Below you can see all of the ingredients that I used as well as the full recipe. A recipe video can also be seen on my TikTok here.

The Oatmeal Cookie Recipe

This recipe will make one 16 inch oatmeal cream cookie. To make a giant oatmeal creme pie, you will need to complete this recipe twice.

Ingredients:

2 cups quick cooking oats (which are finer than whole rolled oats)

2 cups enriched all purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 cup of softened butter (2 sticks)

2 cups dark brown sugar

1 cup raisin paste (made by combining 1/2 cup raisins and 1/2 cup water in a blender or food processor)

2 tsp vanilla extract

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Farenheit.
2. Combine oats, flour, and baking soda in a bowl and stir until well mixed.
3. Using the paddle attachment on a stand mixer, beat the softened butter on high until creamy.
4. Add brown sugar and mix at a lower setting.
5. Add raisin paste and vanilla extract and mix thoroughly.
6. Now mix in the oats/flour/baking soda combination that we made earlier and stir until you have good sticky dough.
7. Move the dough to a lightly greased 16 inch pizza pan and flatten out like a pizza dough. It will not go all the way to the edge, but that's okay because it will grow in the oven. 
   
8. Put in oven for about 24 or 25 minutes or until the edges seem pretty browned. The goal is to make sure the bottom of the cookie is crisp enough that the cookie won't fall apart when you try to make it into a cookie sandwich.
9. Remove from the oven and allow time to cool.
10. Repeat all of these steps again for your second cookie.

Marshmallow Cream Filling

The original oatmeal creme pie had a bouncy marshmallow cream filling, but when I studied it, there wasn't a lot of flavor there. This marshmallow flavor does not hide. With that said, it does have the negative of being less stable than the original. The original filling was shelf stable, but this filling really needs to stay refrigerated when not in use. It will get runny when left out, especially with the weight of giant cookie pressing down on it. This recipe makes approximately 4 cups of filling, which is an appropriate amount for a 16 in cookie sandwich.

Ingredients:

2 egg whites

1 1/2 cups corn syrup

1/2 tsp salt

1 1/2 cups confectioner sugar

1 1/2 tablespoons of vanilla extract

Directions:

• With a stand mixer, mix the egg whites, corn syrup, and salt on high for 5 minutes.
• Mix in confectioner sugar at lower speed. Try to work out any lumps.
• Stir in vanilla extract. You're done!

Be careful when handling the large cookies. You will need to flip one, pour the marshmallow cream onto it and spread it out as best as you can before you put the other cookie on top and complete the sandwich. The cream can get runny when warm, so you will want to refrigerate it when no one is eating it.

Mini Burgers & Sides

This dish was mostly prep work. Some of it was homemade and some of it was store bought. The buns were frozen Brazi Bites, a Brazilian cheese bread. I cooked them longer than the recommend time until the outside became golden and crispy to be more like a hamburger bun. The fries were simply Pik Nik brand potato stings. They were already the right shape and size for tiny fries, so nothing extra needed to be done. For the cheese, I asked chose a block of cheddar at the grocery store and asked them to slice it as thin as they could. Then, I chopped each slice into 9 roughly equal size squares by cutting it into thirds both horizontally and vertically. For the lettuce, I found some long flat leaves at the grocery that I thought would be easy to dice into squares and so I did exactly that. Most of this I was able to day the day before or earlier that day. I also had some petite kosher dill pickles and some cherry tomatoes that I sliced, but I didn't do that until just before dinner so they would still be juicy. 

All of that was pretty easy to do. Other parts took a little more work. For the tiny strips of bacon, I had to get a little creative. I don't eat pork, but I already know from the fact that many bacon bit brands don't contain bacon, that the flavor we often associate with bacon is really just smoke flavor. This is why bacon is always sold as "hickory smoked" or "smoked applewood" or the like. I have a Z Grill pellet smoker now, so I decided to smoke some turkey bacon in order to infuse it with those smokey flavors. This worked perfectly. I smoked the turkey bacon on its lowest smoke setting for about an hour to give it time to catch all that flavor and to crisp up like real bacon. Then, I diced the bacon up into even tinier strips. These came out really good.

Mini Burger Patties

For the burger patties, I had to get more creative. I needed a way to make tiny patties that would fit these tiny rolls and would look and taster like hamburger. The first problem I encountered is that ground beef is not ground fine enough to make patties the size that I was needing. I decided that I would have to chop it more finely with my food processor. I combined 1 lb of 80/20 ground beet, 1 egg yolk (which I saved left over from the marshmallow cream recipe, and 1 tablespoon of Worchestire sauce for flavor. I didn't season with salt or peppers, because the grains would be so big inside the patty.

Once my burger meat was ready, I rolled the meat into small balls and pressed down into 2 inch molds to get accurate shapes and sizes. As an extra precaution, I refrigerated the molds with the meat in them for a least an hour before carefully removing them from the mold and moving the patties to a Tupperware container that I lined with wax paper before each row of patties. I decided that I wanted to wait to cook these until guests arrived.

When it became time to serve, guests built their own plates. I set out the buns, burgers, and toppings along with small bowls that contained different condiments. I had available tiny spoons and also tweezers to act as serving utensils for the toppings. Along with the burgers, I heated up some frozen mini corndogs and pushed popsicle sticks into them to feel more like the real thing. Just for fun, I also had tiny plates, cups, and straws.

Along with the food, I planned some games and activities. There is a stretch of the film where the dad discovers that his shrunken children are somewhere in the backyard. He then begins carefully searching for them amongst the tall grass. This seemed like the perfect opportunity for a game. I decided to hide some things in the backyard for my guests to find. What I hid in the backyard were a few Grow Pets. These are children's toys that you soak in water and they grow. Funny enough, they come in plastic eggs and Easter was last weekend, so this was a bit like an Easter Egg hunt. In addition to the grow pets, I also hid a tiny plastic baby in the grass. This baby came from a king cake kit that I bought back when we did The Labyrinth.

I knew that the baby would be a difficult find, so I decided to give a prize to the winner. While shopping for supplies at Micheals, I came across a fun novelty item that looked like one of those Stanley thermos that everyone was buying a while back. The difference being that this one was only a few inches tall. It seemed very fitting for this meal. Ultimately, they really struggled to find the baby, so before it got dark, I started giving them hints by letting them know when they were close to it. Eventually someone did find the baby and they were delighted by their "special edition Stanley cup" as I called it. 

That is not the only fun non-food thing that I planned. When I was little, I took a tour at Disney World. Part of the tour was showing us how green screens were used during the bee flying scene in Honey I Shrunk The Kids. I was chosen as a volunteer to ride the bee during the green screen demonstration. It was a fun memory. I thought it would be neat to give my guests a similar experience.

My plan was to find a good picture of the bee that I could superimpose a picture of guests onto. However, I couldn't find any good pictures to work with. I did find a picture Antie though. It was not a picture from the movie, but rather a picture from the Disney theme park. I knew that this picture would work great for my needs, but first I needed to remove any signs that this was taken at the park and not in a backyard. I used an AI eraser tool built into my Samsung photo editor software to remove things like a water drain, trash can, building, sign, etc.

Then, during the party, I had friends sit on a bench and I took pictures of them at an angle I felt would fit the image. After the party, I used my the editor software in my phone again to make stickers of my guests and carefully placed those stickers on top of Antie to make the pictures look realistic. I sent these to my guests as keepsakes to remember the night by. Everyone seemed to love the idea.

Overall, I would have to say this was an extremely successful night. Guests really seemed to enjoy the uniqueness of the meal and dessert, loved the movie, and had fun with the activity and photos. If I was to change anything about this night, I would experiment more with the marshmallow cream and see if something could be added to thicken it so it didn't get runny when left out.