Meimei absolutely loves playing with play dough and crazy clay but it often gets left out and dries up, ending with me chucking it in the dustbin. She will spend hours baking “cookies” or making daddy “pies”. I don’t often let her cook with me, as I am worried she burns or injures herself in the kitchen, but whenever I am baking I like to get her involved.
This week we are preparing Christmas presents for the family, which always includes some homemade scrumptious cookies. This year we made sunflower sugar cookies. I will include the recipe below. They are very sweet and tasty, Meimei wants to eat them all!
Baking not only entertains your little one, but it also provides a one-on-one fun learning environment.
We started with giving our hands a good scrub. I explained to Meimei that her hands have germs (dirt) on and that if we don’t wash our hands, our cookies will be dirty. She tried to get her feet in there too, obviously not necessary (or so I thought 😉).
Once our hands were clean we combined some of our dry ingredients into a bowl, Meimei held the bowl with the sieve inside as we counted out the amount for each ingredient. We added the flour, baking soda, baking powder and some salt.
In another bowl we added lots and lots, and LOTS of sugar to one entire cup of sunflower oil. I let Meimei mix this concoction up nicely while I added a teaspoon of vanilla essence. I cracked the eggs and let Meimei open them up and add them to the mixture, one at a time. I quickly gave it one vigorous stir myself before allowing Meimei to pour it all into the dry ingredients.
We mixed, and mixed, and mixed and mixed…. until we had a big ball of dough. It was very sticky, so we had to add a bit of extra flour. We then flattened the dough on the counter and began adding sunflower seeds. Meimei pressed in one seed at a time.
Once we had added all our seeds we rolled the dough, squishing and squeezing it before flattening it back out and cutting circles with a cookie cutter. We placed 12 on a tray and baked at 180 degrees c for 10 minutes. This recipe made three trays. (12 x 3 = 36)
Best part of the activity! Eating warm, fresh cookies!
Ingredients we used:
1.5 cups of flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ a teaspoon baking powder
½ a teaspoon salt
1.5 cups of brown sugar
½ a cup of white sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 cup of sunflower oil
2 eggs
¾ cup of sunflower seeds
I will admit, their may be one nasty booger or toenail hidden in a Christmas cookie, but it is all for a good cause! 😊
