Love baking and watching your kids experimenting in the kitchen?
When I was growing up, some of my best memories are of baking cakes on the weekends. Mum would always be in the kitchen baking or making yummy snacks for us. Honey Crackles, Cream Puffs, Chocolate Cakes, Chocolate Crackles, Cupcakes!
When we were old enough, maybe 8, mum would let us take charge. Experimenting with colours and flavours. We knew the staples to use, and we just added whatever we thought would be yummy.
Sugar & butter, then add flour……….. it would be green food colouring, sultanas, coconut, anything we wanted!! We would try and follow a recipe, and mum would always operate the oven for us.
Are those days gone??
Do you let your children bake and makeup recipes??
My 3 kiddies love cooking. From Spaghetti Bolognese, Muffins to coconut cupcakes. We make Garlic Bread Pull-a-Parts, Chai & Sultana Bread, and many other recipes that we have just made up along the way.
My eldest daughter, 9, likes to make up her own recipes. Some work………and some don’t! It’s all about tweaking recipes that your family loves. Our go to basic Coconut Cake has turned into the base for most of our cakes, cupcakes & muffins. Adding different ingredients and taking out different flavours.
This is obviously where my daughter gets it from. She helps me make the cake base and then we search the pantry to see what to add to the cake to make our different flavours.
She watches me change and adds things with confidence, and once it’s all cooked and we taste it, if I get it wrong, I’m not that upset.
Hubby usually still eats it! But when I get it right, we write it down and remember that one for another day!!
Never any measurements, we just go by texture and taste!! Raw taste testing is the best!! Didn’t we all used to fight over licking the spoon??
Miss 9 likes to add Cherries and Marshmallows, Nuts and Dates. She has fun with Food Colouring, which I hate as it ends up all over my kitchen! But in our house, when you bake, you also clean up after yourself.
I sometimes feel guilty sending the same old recess to school with the kids. This is where my passion for cooking things a little different came from. Testing recipes and trying to think outside the box.
My children love Spaghetti Bolognese. So I thought, why not try and make a muffin to send to school with the kids. By tweaking the main meal recipe, and binding it together with some raw eggs and cheese, I find the perfect consistency for a muffin.
And who doesn’t like Fried Rice?? Making Fried Rice muffins is just another main meal recipe that I can now send as a recess snack. The more Miss 9, Miss 7 & Master 6 help me in the kitchen, and have a say in what goes into our cooking, the better they seem to eat!!
My girls are perfect little eaters in my book. Maybe it’s because I have always fed them real food. No packaged foods or no processed food when they were first learning to eat. Their taste buds were tasting real food and not the same old bland taste that processed baby food has!
My Son, on the other hand, was fed packaged food from 6 months of age as a convenience to me, as having a hubby who worked FIFO and 3 children 3 and under was starting to take its toll. In hindsight, I wish I had never gone down that track!
It was only for 6 months, but that is the taste he first had and I’m guessing his taste buds developed around those bland plain foods. It took me years to get him to enjoy vegetables, meat, fish and pasta.
They love vegetables, fish (crumbed), red meat, white meat, eggs, rice and especially pasta dishes.
We love making food with our Thermomix and helping our kiddies experiment in the kitchen. Do you?