For years my grandmother on the farm made Bonnie Sue and I matching aprons every Christmas. In the spring my cousin and I wore our aprons and used Grandma’s bashed up and battered pots to put on a pretend cooking show for the backyard chickens.
Maybe kids don’t make mud pies anymore (I always thought they should be called mud cakes.) The children I asked recently don’t. So a few years back I bought a great set of mixing, measuring and pouring devices and other implements for four little kids I know and I showed them how to make mud pies.

I visited a few weeks later and to my horror I saw they’d discovered MUD FINGER PAINTING! Although in this case the correct phraseology could have been hand, arm, and maybe even face smearing over one entire side of their apartment unit. Plus its sliding doors. I could see this was an extension and modification of my handy work and I apologized profusely. Their parents kept saying, “Its OK.” so it might have been an oversight but the scene of the crime had not been cleaned up in honor of my visit.
I always thought the name should be ‘mud cakes.’ I’d had a creative adventure in mud pieing as a kid myself, when at about seven. A neighbor, whose current Dad was a salesman, and I decorated the previous day’s pies with sticks and leaves when creativity grabbed my friend by the head and she was struck by a brilliant idea. I use the word,”struck” on purpose because that’s what I was afraid would happen to Becky. She’d remembered seeing tiny, cute, little, just the right size for little girl hands, begging to be used, sample sized, tubes of toothpaste, or in this case, MUD CAKE FROSTING! At first I repeated over and ever, “Are you sure this is OK?” but it looked so fun. I helped her use every single tube. Becky never mentioned if she’d gotten beaten again.
This memory became part of my story Eagles and Banana Peels at Amazon where Grandfather shows Gracie the great culinary trick of toothpaste topped cakes.  nancymauerman.com