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It's our baby girl's birthday during the week so I decided to have cake the weekend before. Often I do a bit of baking with my older son on a Saturday morning, depending on the weather. It's becoming one of the routine things we do and he often asks if we can do it. I keep it simple, we usually make something where wet ingredients are easily mixed into dry, rubbing butter into flour is just too much. Our repertoire revolves around oat cookies, buns of some description or a simple cake. We did make bread once which is also a great thing to do with kids as they can pound it about and make whatever shape bread rolls they like.
One of our regulars is a Madeleine recipe that we use to make mini muffins, it's so simple, gluten free and delicious. When we started our morning bakes I put in mind that the purpose was the doing not the result! He can play with ingredients, learn a bit about how we prepare food and maybe enjoy eating the result. But (touch wood!!) so far everything we've made had been edible, nothing has been chucked in the bin.
Our routine is generally that he helps measuring out and mixing and then gets a bit bored and drifts to the sink where the real mess I mean fun happens- washing up- while I finish up the actual baking. The floor gets covered in flour, then water and is finally, hopefully, a bit cleaner than it was before we started. My boy loves cleaning so wiping all the surfaces and moping up the considerable amount of water that always makes it onto the kitchen floor is definitely part of the fun for him.
This week we baked a simple all in one sponge cake which I then filled with jam and we iced with a basic icing and sprinkles. I also made some ginger biscuits later when the kids were both napping. I let the boy decorate them with these coloured chocolate pens although they were a bit hard for him to control so the pigs, rabbits and stars ended up just being squirted with little heaps of chocolate.
We started cooking when boy was about 3, I'm sure other younger kids can do it but this was about the age I felt he would actually be able to do something and not just make a mess where we both felt frustrated. But keeping in mind that it's a fun activity and a perfect result is not the purpose helps me not to stress about it and just enjoy hanging out with my little one in the kitchen.
Do you have any great kids cooking ideas to share? Let me know in the comments or message me!