One of our favourite stay at home activities is baking (and eating the results).
I try and stay away from anything complicated as I just want them to enjoy being in the kitchen at this age and we like to make it as fun as possible so colourful sprinkles are definitely the way to go in our house and you certainly can’t be precious about what the end result looks like when there’s a child in charge.
Last week Miss Frugal made some chocolate cupcakes on her own while I sat and played on my laptop watched her and they turned out looking very different to how I would have made them (gold glitter spray on top!) but actually they probably tasted nicer than when I make them. She even made a little video on my phone as she went along.
It’s only about 15 seconds long but it’s the cake making from start to finish….
Super Simple Chocolate Cupcakes
- 150g Butter / Margarine
- 150g Sugar
- 3 Eggs
- 1 capful of vanilla essence
- 120g Flour
- 30g Cocoa
Beat the butter and the sugar together
Add the eggs and the vanilla essence to the bowl and beat it all together.
Add the cocoa and flour and give it all a good stir.
Pop the mix into your cupcake cases and bake in the oven at 190 for around 12-15 minutes.
Ice the cakes however you want to – Miss Frugal melted some chocolate and then as that was just about to set on the cakes she used some gold glitter spray as you can see in the video above but when I make them, I’m a bit more OCD about the icing 😉
I find that recipes that are simple enough that children can make them more or less independently work better, especially now that my two are 8 and 10. Simple recipes mean that they can read the instructions themselves (reading practice), measure the ingredients themselves (numeracy practice), actually do the making themselves (chill time for me) and they’re much prouder of the end result.
Here’s some of our favourite cook with kids recipes:
No Cook chocolate crunch cakes
Do you have a favourite recipe that you make when you’re cooking with small people? If you’ve blogged it, let me know and I’ll add it to this post.
(The gold spray and lots of other baking goodies that we’ve used above are made by Dr Oetker – we use a lot of their products anyway so it was great to come home to a big box last week – thank you.)
