Showing posts with label cooking with kids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooking with kids. Show all posts

Sunday, 2 June 2013

Baking with a toddler - Fairy Cakes

Fairy cakes are a lovely easy recipe for toddlers to have a go at and taste delicious! Poppet absolutely loves helping to make them, and even stays in the kitchen when I switch the mixer on now (previously she would run out of the room and hide behind a pillow on the sofa until I switched it off)!

This is the recipe we use:


Fairy Cakes

Makes 12
  • 2 eggs (weigh these in their shells)
  • an equal weight of self-raising flour
  • an equal weight of stork ( or you could use softened butter)
  • an equal weight of caster sugar
  • 1 tsp vanilla essence
  • milk if necessary
Cream together the stork and caster sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time along with a tablespoon of the flour and mix to combine. Add the vanilla extract and the rest of the flour and mix. At this point I sometimes add a splash of milk to loosen the mixture if it needs it.

Divide the mixture into 12 paper cases and bake in the oven at 180ºC/160ºC fan for about 20 minutes. Cool on wire rack before decorating.



Poppet is really good at carefully weighing out the ingredients now. When we first starting baking she would spill stuff everywhere but now the whole process is a lot cleaner. She talks away while she measuring and it is great for strengthening her vocabulary - 'too much' and 'little bit more' being her favourite phrases. 

Her favourite thing to do however is to crack the eggs. She is so proud of herself now that she can do it on her own. We have to fish out some bits of shell of course!


Once cooled I gave her some icing and whatever I had to hand in the baking cupboard - today it was mini marshmallows, hundreds and thousands, and glace cherries (which she refused to touch and looked at very distrustfully).


She liked putting the marshmallows "in the middle" of each cake, and licking the glace icing. I put on the butter icing as it was a bit thick for her to do it.


Enjoying the fruits of her labour

Poppet : 2yrs 4mos
Little 8 mos





Thursday, 25 April 2013

Decorating Digestives

This is something I remember doing as a little girl with my mum and wee sister (shout out to my sister Anna who is an actual qualified teacher and gives me leftover craft supplies!), and I was reminded of it when I came across it in Poppet's Make with Maisy book. I switched the icing for melted chocolate because we have a glut of leftover non-Cadbury chocolate Easter eggs, and my mum has arrived to stay bearing Jelly Tots & Chocolate Buttons so I used them too. I put the sweeties out in little bowls along with some raisins and hundreds&thousands and a bowl of melted chocolate, ready for Poppet to wake up from her afternoon nap.


I find this is the best time for me to set up a little 'Invitation To Play' for her as it gives her something to focus on while coming to from her groggy sleepy state. CBeebies also works!
She got stuck in pretty much straightaway, after a little instruction on how to 'glue' the sweets and raisins on she was away. She only popped a few sweets in her mouth and was very restrained considering. 

The finished biscuits!