to think Guides should be able to make cakes?

[bonbonours]

Maybe I'm just old.... My 10 year old goes to Guides and came home having done Valentine's baking with a pretty bag containing a chocolate crispie cake and a cupcake. She told me the cakes were a Shopkins cake mix where you just added water. They then iced them with runny water icing and sprinkles. Now I thought Guides was partly about learning life skills. Am I unreasonable to think learning to make a basic 4442 sponge cake should not be beyond a group of 10-14 year olds? My 6 year old could tell you the ingredients for a sponge cake. Using a cake mix is a) not real cooking b) tastes horrid c) more expensive than buying ingredients so not teaching good money skills either.

I was exceptionally shy but not sure if that would count. The Brown Owl was the local barmaid and a friend of my Mum's. I did go to another group initially but they were really old fashioned. The first summer camp I went to was with them and we had to take along a basin and soak our feet every night!

I agree that most 10 yr olds would be perfectly capable of baking a cake, however, as everyone has pointed out - that's when there are one or two of them in a kitchen, not 10 - 25 of them in a community hall. Where would they get all the equipment from? Do you have that many sets of scales and are you prepared to take them all up on the night then clean them and take them home at the end ? (x all other bits of equipment). Remember this was just one activity too - they have a limited time to get it done.

Cooking is a skill, baking is both a skill and a science. I ask the girls for their input, they want to bake, so we bake.

I would still be 11 when I left, I think I went up for some sessions to Guides before the school holidays with a view to starting properly after the holidays by which point I would be 12. I never went then because I didn't like it when I went to the meetings before the holidays.

Thanks for this thread OP, I've just been looking at pictures of the first centre I went camping to and amazingly it doesn't look like it's changed in 40 odd years! Also discovered that it was only about half an hour (14 miles)away from my house but it seemed like we were on the opposite side of the country. Instead we were just the other side of the hill I could see from my bedroom window! :o

I started as a Brownie in 1966, the age range then was 7-10, 10- 14 for Guides the Rangers. The same as it is now, except now there are Rainbows 5-7.

Guiding is absolutely not about teaching girls to be good little housewives. We do do cooking yes, but it's just one thing. I do not see my role as a guider as that of a cookery teacher teaching how to make things "from scratch" every time. Guides are now very much "girl led" in that the girls have a big say in the activities they do.
On this occasion it sounds like the aim was to do something for Valentine's day, decorating cakes and a sweet treat sound fine to me.

At our hall, which is pretty standard in terms of equipment, we have a kitchen about 3.5m square, not much worktop, one sink and an old, small cooker. There is no cooking equipment at all, not one bowl, set of scales, wooden spoon or oven tray. Absolutely everything has to come from home.
We normally plan meetings so only one group is cooking at a time, the logistics of processing 10 bun trays of cupcakes through an oven which only takes 2 trays at a time in an hour and a half makes it almost impossible. A cake mix would be the only way to go with the whole group, God knows how they got them all mixed, cooked, cooled and decorated during one meeting. Hats off to your Dd' s leaders!

Oh, and if the only cooking you have done is with your own DC at home, you can have no idea of the absolute mayhem of 25 kids with added sloppy cake mix. Or how far said cake mix can go......

Or how far said cake mix can go......
lol - that is very true. Reminds me of the time we did cake decorating with the cubs, I made the mistake of supplying red food colouring, the Scout Hut looked like a murder scene by the time the cubs had finished !

When I was a guide (1970s) you actually learnt that stuff at home and then did your eg "hostess" badge or "cooking" badge.

Its unreasonable to expect in such a short time scale and at usual hall facilities they have the opportunity to make cakes etc. There are even issues about cooked foods and special licences etc.

We have to bring all our equipment from home too. The only things in the kitchen cupboards are plastic cups and a couple of old mugs. I don't think people realise how time consuming and bloody hard work it is, having to cart stuff around and it's often a LOT of stuff. Planning activities, carrying them out, budgeting and books, cleaning up, legal stuff and I'm disabled and only have one helper. All voluntary! Add to that I teach, so have to empty my small car on a Wednesday for Guide and Brownie stuff and store both school and Guiding stuff in my small house. It's inconvenient and hard work but I do it for the girls - same as some the children I teach - some don't get the opportunity to do these things at home and we are a cheap, easily accessible weekly activity. They love it.

Whoever said they camped with brownies is probably mistaken. It was indoors only until 1990s and even now really quite rare for brownies to camp outdoors.
Wanker: summer born you would have started brownies just after your 7th Birthday, not 8th.

By camp I didn't mean outdoors. It was still called "camp".

Odd. Brownie holidays are supposed to be called "Pack Holidays". Guides were camp because Brownies didn't camp.

When I was a Guide long ago we wore our uniforms to school on 'Thinking Day' in February. We, in what is now Y7, were surprised when one girl turned up in Brownie uniform as she was still 10. She must have come to the school a year early as the rest of us were 11 by the previous September.

I totally appreciate the hard work the volunteers put in and I do volunteer to help out as well. The point about kitchen facilities is the same whether they do a mix or use actual ingredients, they could still do it in the hall, and still need an oven. They have a fridge and oven anyway. They manage to do 'real' cakes with groups of 5 year olds at our infant school in a one hour session so I'm just a bit surprised people think 10-14 year olds wouldn't be able to manage it in a 90 minute session. Butter could be left out to be softened (then you wouldn't need the fridge anyway!)

In answer to lots of people, yes she enjoyed it and yes she already knows how to make cakes as we do it a lot at home, I just felt it was unnecessary dumbing down. I did cooks badge in Brownies (so aged 7-10) and remember having to peel potatoes and other stuff which was more advanced than mixing a pack with water.

Clandestino thanks for your inaccurate assumptions. I of course said thank you to my daughter for the beautifully wrapped cake she gave me (as it's nearly my birthday) and told her what a great job she'd done making and decorating it).

It's not that I think 10-14 year olds can't manage to make "proper" cake, but the logistics of making the cake from scratch and decorating them with the whole group in the time allowed, specially as they also made the crispie cakes, would be very difficult. With a mix you could have the first batch in the oven very quickly, it takes much longer to do "properly", so there would be time to get them all done.

It also depends on the aim of the activity- it sounds like it was to produce a decorated cupcake, not to learn how to bake iyswim. A different activity might be to compare cost/taste/ease of use of bought cake, packet mix and home made. An activity we have run a number of times, but with small groups not the whole unit. We have also made cakes over a camp fire and in a cardboard box oven as well as cake in a mug the most dangerous cake in the world
Oh and guides still can do the cooks badge, but some f it still is done at home.

Odd. Brownie holidays are supposed to be called "Pack Holidays". Guides were camp because Brownies didn't camp

It was more than likely what my mum referred to it as rather than Brownies themselves maybe? I have 4 older brothers who probably camped.

I am a parent volunteer at DS's scout group. I always seem to help on the night they have their patrol cooking challenge. Dear god the mess afterwards

We have a fully functioning kitchen with a couple of ovens in the hut, but there isn't enough room in the kitchen to have all the scouts in there at once so they have to spread out in the hut. It never fails to amaze me how much food can end up on the floor. And no matter how quick a recipe is, it always takes much longer than you think it will and seems to use every utensil we have in the hut.

So by the end of the session there is always a huge pile of washing up and mopping of floors required. The scouts will do some but I usually have to stay on at least half an hour to help sort it out. Do not estimate the amount of work that goes into a cooking/baking session.

The scouts always seem to enjoy it and out of the chaos they manage to provide some tasty meals (my reward for being a volunteer is to taste their food!)

I don't agree it's necessarily 'dumbing down' cooking. It is probably just trying to make cooking as accessible as possible with the available time both within the session and preparation.

There are so many unknowns

• Resources... scales, bowls etc. Where would they come from? I doubt the Guide pack has a stock of their own and understandably the leaders maybe unwilling to let a pack of guides loose with their own expensive ones.
• Time - Maybe the leader has to come straight from work/ sorting own kids out and doesn't have time for sorting and weighing half a dozen cake mixes of flour, sugar etc into tubs ready. I doubt there'd be time for a large pack to do it themselves with just one or two of the leaders own scales brought in from their own kitchens. So buying kits and keeping them in the car and bringing straight to group would make sense. Saves them an hour or two in preparation/ washing up time. Particuarly if they are short of helpers then it may well be do it from a packet or not at all.
• What the group is like! Maybe some of the girls have more needs than others. So while your daughter maybe be fine, the leaders maybe aware that some of the group would really struggle to do the task safely, in time and without causing chaos if having to start from scratch.
• The leaders ability! When I was a guide I still remember the leader saying they were a terrible cook so I can't remember ever doing cooking apart from baked potatoes!

These people are volunteers (speaking as a guider myself) and very often put up their own money to provide the resources for the girls. Were there time constraints? What about the kitchen facilities? We can't fit 20 girls in the kitchen at a time and doing it in shifts means the cakes won't get baked. To do a properly measured out cake you need a bowl per girl/pair, spoon, set of scales, baking tray... I don't happen to have 10 kitchen scales to provide for my unit.

So... yes, girls should be able to make a standard 4,4,4,2 cake but doing it en masse is nigh on impossible.

Guiding is now more girl led than ever so there really is less focus on life skills than before.

She is 10. Perhaps the OP should gave taught her to bake by now? Easy enough to blame a volunteer. Mine are younger than that and know how to bake a cake.

Assuming they did not get a badge for this, then I don't see the problem. If they were awarded a cake making badge for using a packet mix then it'd be questionable, but otherwise it was just a fun activity

It sounds like baking might not have been the only activity? On camp ours cook entirely on fire from start to finish, but we'll still have weeks where we decorate biscuits with premade icing! It's about what fits in the programme at that time in terms of facilities, volunteers, time, space and prior planning.

Take my word for it, baking with guide groups is a flipping disaster! The girls really do love baking but the mess is unreal. My fellow leader and I are usually there for at least about 45 minutes afterwards cleaning up and as a result we don't do it as often as we'd like. That said we do everything from scratch but that's mainly because I'm a foodie and abhore waste, but I'd give anyone giving up their own time to volunteer credit for doing anything with the girls :)

Maybe it was just a fun and creative thing to do.