We all need to ask ourselves before embarking on these kitchen missions with our wee babes, do I have enough patience? Can I be bothered cleaning up all of the mess? Am I able to not take over when it goes wrong? Aggghhh.....it can be such a trialling time that is for sure!
I would love to give my three children basic cooking skills as it a necessity for their future lives away from Mum and Dad. (Mostly Mum). This is the kind of image I had in my head when I finally decided to teach them early the ins and outs of the kitchen.......
A few years ago I started investing in the Dora Cooks Collection which indeed ended up to be a total ripoff everytime the new magazine came out and not to mention the cost of all of the ingredients added up, we gave it a go and here was our first recipe made (when I say we, I mean my 6 year old daughter).......
I had to refrain many times from taking over and my husband was not keen on letting our kids handle sharp knives even though they were closely supervised.
So here we were, well here she was, my daughter Zykalee, hat and apron on, hands cleaned and sanitised.....measuring all of her ingredients making a blimmen mess with the flour, squishing the butter into the floor as it dropped and she stood all through it. Not a bad measuring effort overall for her first time though I must admit.
Deep breaths and cleaning up the mess from around her would be key to me keeping my sanity during this ordeal!
Rubbing the cubed butter into the flour was a much loved delight for my child as her favourite thing to do lately was get grubby and make a mess. She was definitely not the clean sweet child I knew at the age of three who had to change clothing if even a speck of dust landed on her wee prim and proper carefully selected attire.
Rest of ingredients added, cheese chucked in and presto, we had a cookie dough to roll out. I thought this would be the tricky part but she took to this amazingly well. Cookies were rolled and cut with butterfly cutters and placed on the tray.
Egg timer on and cookies in oven!!!!!!! The 8 minute wait for Zykalee watching the oven seemed life a lifetime for her but gave me a quick few minutes to tidy up some more and make the kitchen presentable once more and even get the jug reboiled for my overdue cup of coffee.
Egg timer went off and we had BUTTERFLY BISCUITS (and a clean bench, YAY)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Overall Zykalee made great biscuits, she did have egg in the back of her hair and butter all over the kitchen tiles and flour all over everything but nothing that could not of been cleaned and the memory we made together is priceless and forever.
Thanks for viewing and we will be posting more trialling recipes made by the hands of my wee babes in the near future.