When making sand dolls, you should remember a nice nursery rhyme. Without it, the sand will not separate properly from the sides of the container and the bundt cake will fail. As a child, you probably remember spending happy mornings and afternoons on the beach. The best sand for sand puppets was moist, loose sand. To get it, you had to dig a little deeper than the surface of the sand. We filled a bundt pan or bucket full of it and tamped it down well to fill it. Then, bottom up, the little doll was tipped over onto the sandbox curb or a flat patch of dirt near the sandbox, and the following rhyme was used while tamping the container with a shovel.

Why “beat like rye”? Because cakes, pies, breads, and other baked goods require flour milled from grain. Grains like wheat and rye had to first be “pounded” out of the ear with a flail, which looked like a thresher pounding the grain. Only the grain thus produced would be milled in a flour mill. The flour was bagged and taken to the bakery for baking.

Let\’s go back to the sandbox and make a cake. Beat it with a shovel and repeat a few nice rhymes in succession.
When you feel that the work could be finished, you unload the container and a nice sand bundt cake stands on the curb of the sandbox, or conversely, a pile of sand from the failed bundt cake collapses. And I could go on and on until it was almost evening and I had to go home. It was fun.

So, when you go to the sandbox with your little ones, remember this lovely and necessary rhyme when making dolls. I bet your son, daughter, or grandson will flash back to it as a connoisseur of the good old days. And if you bake and make a bundt cake together, you might even feel a little younger.