What are your favourite baking and school holiday activities to do with your DCs? Tell Flora for the chance to win a £150 John Lewis voucher NOW CLOSED

[AngelieMumsnet]

With warmer weather still far away, Flora would love to hear about Mumsnetters' favourite baking activities, as well as other indoor activities for you and your DCs.

Here's what Flora have to say: "We know that here in the UK, we're not blessed with the most predictable weather and as the first school holiday approaches and you’re still stuck indoors, it’s not always easy to keep dreaming up activities to keep the kids from climbing the walls that don’t eat into the household budget. Flora is here to offer a helping hand, baking with Flora Buttery is about having a good time, and not making the perfect creations – our all-in-one recipe couldn’t be simpler and needs just 15 minutes prep time, five ingredients and one bowl. Even better when you are all baked out and the tub is empty it can be used for fun, simple arts and crafts activities!"

So, do you have any baking activities which you love to do with your DCs? What do you like to bake? Are there any recipes you follow, or do you prefer to get creative while baking with your DCs?

If you're not a baker, do you have any other fail-safe activities for you and your DCs to do indoors? Maybe you like to work on arty projects? Or perhaps you've invented some games to play together?

Whatever your favourite activities are, Flora would love to hear about them.

Everyone who posts on this thread will be entered into a prize draw where one winner will receive a £150 John Lewis voucher.

Please note your comments may be included on Flora's social media channels, and possibly elsewhere, so please only post if you're comfortable with this.

Thanks and good luck,
MNHQ

I'm not a baker but have taught them to make nice pasta dishes!

Mine love baking - pizza, scones and bread are favourites here, although they also love making cupcakes and decorating them with what seems like every single decoration they can find in the cupboard!

Board games and den making are also great indoor activities, especially if they are allowed to eat lunch in their den.

we love to make flapjacks with a variety of different adds like chocolate chips, raisins, and crunchy nut cornflakes they really are a winner in this house and we love to play board games like Sorry and draughts

We love baking, anything and everything, favourites are gingerbread and fairy cakes.

We love making American style cookies. Have a very basic, simple recipe that we use as a base but the kids love to experiment with different flavourings. Quick, simple and delicious!

we love having crafty days, we save cardboard boxes and cartons and glue them together to see what we can invent :D

We absolutely love to bake together and often only find the time in the school holidays. We also take part in lots of activities together but I also make it a mission to spend as little money when off school as possible unless we're actually away on holiday so we make full use of places like the library, local farms and parks etc.

My DD1 loves to bake- we make macarons, vanilla biscuits ,almond biscuits, shortbread, gingerbread,large choice chip cookies and cakes .She also helps me with an almond cake. Occasionally we make our own icing decorations.
She will often google a recipe .She makes popcorn lots .
We also like art and craft and have made decoupage stools with old beano comics.This summer she found a crayon art thing where we stuck crayons onto a canvas and then melted them with a hair drier. She also did some graffiti art with stencils and spray cans, with her brother .She likes to go to the cinema and go hang out with her friends at the shops.We also have been cycling to our local Park- Richmond Park once a week last summer.She now into hair styles and practices hair styling too. I like to take the children to an art gallery or a museum to see a special exhibition once a year too. They have been to see Damien Hirst, Chris Offilli, David Hockney at The Tate and Picasso and to the British Museum, once we saw a Pompeii exhibition there. They were fascinated with the coin section of the British Museum. I have also taken them to the Horniman Museum in SE London.We also go to the Southbank and see whats going on there ...We are very lucky to be in London.

Gingerbread men and jam tarts, all the way!

We love making our own pizzas and I can control the fat/salt content more easily. Having a range of toppings to choose from also encourages the DDs to add vegetables to their pizza.

Fairy cakes are also a favourite and again, home-made are so much healthier that shop-bought.

DD loves baking, we sometimes make fairy cakes in lurid colours but she mainly likes making biscuits covered in sprinkles - we have dozens of cutters in all manner of shapes.

So that we don't have biscuits coming out of our ears we sometimes make salt dough decorations instead - all the making fun with the rolling pin and cutters, without the piles of tempting biscuits at the end!

We bake what they are going to have in pack lunch boxes, so they get to pick each week

When it's close to one of our birthdays we usually bake biscuits a few days before with the kid's and decorate them with lovely messages for the birthday boy or girl to eat and share on their special day. It's really nice to have thing the family have made which say great things about you.

DD enjoys making cakes and biscuits, but her favourite part is definitely making a huge mess with (and eating most of) the icing!

We love baking cakes, breads and homemade pizzas-foodie family!

mint choc cookies - absolutely amazing

I love baking gingerbread men with DD, there are so many possibilities for decorating them. She'd rather decorate than eat them :)

we love baking. fairy cakes are a great standby as they are always fun to decorate. Today we made flapjacks.

My toddler DS 'decorated ' his first biscuit this week. It mainly involved eating chocolate icing but I'm amazed how quiet it kept him for so long.

We love getting out the Playdough and paints and doing lots of craft stuff.

We also like making an enormous tent in the lounge with sheets, playing dress up and acting out the characters of their favourite shows.

baking is a definite favourite activity and we cook and bake all sorts as the kids love to help with both savoury meals and also with baking cookies and cakes and sweet treats.

Lots of messy play and craft is also on the agenda for us...shaving foam play (perfect in winter as pretend 'snow', small scale water play so we don't get too cold and wet (using flora tubs with sails in as boats), playing with dried pasta, pulses and rice is always fun too.

My kids love any sort of baking and are old enough to follow a simple recipe themselves now so I just need to be on hand for tricky bits and the oven! Oh, and cleaning up afterwards!

Cookies are a favourite, as are cupcakes as they love to decorate them. We also make bread dough in our bread machine and then use that to make faces or animals. It's a great activity as they have fun eating them too and it's a bit healthier than the sweet stuff!

My 2 and half year old loves baking and cooking in the kitchen. We have high barstools which he uses to reach the countertop and helps make Dad's packed lunch everyday. Over the last week he has helped me make scones, shortbread cookies, soup and lasagne. He adores helping and where a task is too complicated for him I improvise by putting something in a bowl that he can stir around. We didn't have time to bake a cake a couple of weeks ago for instance so since we had a shop bought one in we pretended to bake it and put some flour in a bowl with water and stirred that then put it in the oven to bake. I sliced the shop bought cake and he was over the moon!

Other activities we love are playing shops, making tents and painting.

Weighing, measuring and bashing up lots of chocolate to make brownies and chocolate fudge cake.

My 2 DS also enjoy making biscuits to decorate but end up eating half of them before this happens!

They also enjoy making Asian food and my eldest really got the hang of rolling out chapati's over Xmas holidays. Lots of flour everywhere though!!

A nice long bike ride always follows after the scoffing fest if the weather is good, if not then it's a popcorn and a movie!

X

I have a toddler and she already loves pretending to cook on her play kitchen. I am looking forward to doing some basic baking with her soon - we have a surfeit of rice krispies at the moment so perhaps a slightly messy start to would be some krispie cakes.

As a child I didn't really bake with my mum as she didn't like the mess. I will see how long my patience lasts!