Baking with a 4 year old

[Yumchips]

How do people do it? I feel like people enjoying baking with their young kids but feels stressful for me. 4 year old is too enthusiastic but can't do any task properly and makes a mess. Then loses interest and tries to move on to something else. Am I doing it wrong?

Pre-weigh. Know the recipe inside and out, in fact do the same recipe time and again and tweak it by adding different bits. Accept that it will be stressful sometimes. You either have a nice time or you level up your patience skills!

I have made this www.thelondoner.me/2016/03/french-yogurt-cake-easiest-cake-world.html over and over, it's very easy, uses volume measurements instead of grams and never really goes wrong. Plus you can put loads of different stuff in to change the flavour.

I also bought a mini muffin silicon mould thing, it makes child-sized cakes about a quarter of the size of normal ones, helps to avoid giving your kid huge slabs of cake!

If it's really stressful then you can ice a pre-bought cake or even just put icing and sprinkles etc on some digestives.

Another vote for pre-measuring ingredients - using rainbow cupcakes cases for cupcakes generally keeps my 4 yo happy and sometimes we separate the mixture and make it different colours and then match them up or make rainbow combos. While the cakes/biscuits etc bake, I get the crayons and paper out which keep him occupied and allows me to clear the decks, but he still feels involved because he’s in the kitchen/diner with me (and the oven!). Then I put the various decorations into different small bowls and let him go for it!

Sometimes if I feel energetic enough I make a double batch of dough if we are making cookies and freeze it. Easy to then defrost and roll out for him to cut out and decorate without as much effort!

Lots of good advice here - I would add, if you have a printer, print the recipe (or write it out). It's somehow easier to scan than having to scroll on phone/ipad/laptop which inevitably gets covered in flour etc.

I’d counter those who say preweigh - the second mine could vaguely count they were in charge of telling me when I’d poured enough (clearly I also kept a sly eye on the scales). Fantastic real world numbers and they loved it.

Agree though that you bake and they decorate is frequently the winner. We did it with DSs (5 and 9) and two of their mates on Monday and they had a calm and peaceful hour (almost unheard of here for activities involving both DSs) with a bowl of thick water icing each and all the sprinkles their hearts could desire.

A friend gave me a good tip. Just buy biscuits (something like Rich Tea), make up some simple icing and let them decorate it (eg stick on sweets/sprinkles). That's the bit they seem to enjoy!

https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/decorationstoppingsgs---fillings/sainsburys-farmyard-biscuit-kit-260g

Bought this is sainsburys today to make with DS (3.8) for Santa's snack. Includes stencils and you have to roll out the biscuits and then decorate them!

Fill the sink with warm water and dishwashing liquid before starting. When they start to get bored then you can swap them over to water play "washing up" while you finish off and give a quick wipe down.
Second what pp's have said about deep bowls, pre measuring ingredients and treating it as an activity.