baking with your toddler

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how old were your toddlers when you started baking with them, and what did you bake?

DS is 16mo and is too young still but am looking forward to baking with him and was wondering how much longer I have to wait?!

We started about then.

I put a low table in the kitchen, gave him a bowl and put ingredients in it (mini marshmallows, cornflakes, melted chocolate etc and let him stir and crush things into shapes!

It was (and still is) all very messy but great fun.

Simple biscuits with cookie cutters are also easy. At 2.5 he loves icing fairy cakes and covering them with sprinkles and sweets.

I also let him break and chop up veg with a blunt knife and he weighs ingredients too as he loves the clock (scales)!!

I would say you can get a toddler that age involved in baking with certain recipes. For example, making a banana bread - give your toddler a super ripe banana and a plastic knife and let him at it! DD has been whisking eggs since around that age and thus assisting with quiches, scrambled eggs and cakes/muffins. The main thing for me is to get all the quantities measured out ahead of time so the actual "making" part is quite quick. I don't need to tell you that toddlers have a short attention span! Also I make DD sit in her high chair so the mess is somewhat contained.

Toddlers are too tough to bake with. You want to bake with babies while they're still milk fed and tender.

On a serious note, my kids have baked with me since they could stand and hold a spoon to stir.

My DD "helps" and has done for a while (19mo now). She has an apron and a wooden spoon, and she stands on a chair next to me mixing stuff and generally eating as much of the cake/cookie mix as she can. It's really messy, but really fun.

Sorry to hijack but I'm also looking for ideas on what I can cook with 3yo DD

Silly, we do brownies, blondies, cakes and cookies together. As long as anything needing preparing on the stove (caramel, melted chocolate, etc.) is done with her safely on the other side of the kitchen, everything works well!

I imagine with an older child they would like doing more of the mixing themselves, so blondies and brownies are perfect - you can just bung everything in one bowl and get them to stir. They can also cut out cookie shapes or help measure ingredients out, like Theincidental says.

And decorating cookies and fairy cakes is always fun with kids. You can prepare little bowls of different coloured icing and sprinkles and whatnot, and just let them get on with it.

Think we were cooking at that point.
Shortbread style biscuits (or 1oz sugar creamed with 2 oz butter, and mix in 3 oz of plain flour, with a little cocoa or ginger if you want to change the flavour, roll out, cut out shapes and cook 180C for 10 mins), icing biscuits/cakes popular, as was mashing up banana for banana muffins. Cutting mushrooms etc with a table knife. Making muffin pizzas - spread tomato puree on a split muffin, sprinkle on cheese, mushrooms and ham - both of which can be cut with a table knife, and grill til cheese melted.

Mine now will do anything (4 and 2) - tho cooking Daddy's birthday cake last weekend was very popular.

DS1 also likes tasting at every stage - butter, sugar, creamed mixture etc. I didn't cook with eggs for a while.

If they are interested, as soon as they can hold a spoon, they can help mix, afaic.

at hermione

I started when dd could stand on a chair next to me at the counter, so about 12 months, or there abouts. She loves it

DD's first cooking was whisking usually yorkshires, whilst sitting in her high chair (one of the Ikea wooden high seats not a strapped in one). She was very slow to stand reliably and walk so was pre 2 at this stage.

She does lots of bread rolls.

Her favourite is probably doing pizza. Rolling out the dough, mixing herbs into tomato sauce/ pasata then slopping it about on the rolled out dough, doing the sprinkle sprinkle of grated cheese then making faces or sunshine or trees out of what ever scraps of veg and meat we have to hand. She tends to sample most of the ingredients as we go.

The beauty of pizza is it doesn't really matter if the dough isn't fully rolled out and the messier the better.

Decorating biscuits is quick and fun. They can get involved with mixing a bit of water into the icing sugar and sticking sweets onto value digestives.