20 September 2013

Baking with Kids

American-style Pumpernickel, possibly the best
bread-machine bread ever.
Doughy-Mater.
It's important to me that my kids learn to cook.  Being able to cook from scratch is fun and saves a lot of money compared to eating out or even just eating packet/boxed/tinned foods and such.  There is also the added bonus that they might eventually cook me a meal, which would be totally awesome.  I love cooking and usually cook 3 meals a day, but I wouldn't mind a break every now and then.  :D

My older boys are 3 and 5, which seems a bit young to start cooking, but lately they've been hanging around the kitchen, asking me about what I'm doing, so I figured it was time to start a little 'Home Ec.'  (They've also asked me to teach them how to sew and knit, how cool is that?  I'm such a lucky mom.)

Baked-Mater!
Baking can seem kind of daunting, so I decided we should start with that.  I thought we should make something simple and fun, but also really delicious and rewarding, so we started with (American-style) pumpernickel in the bread maker.  (Recipe coming soon!  I am going to tweak the recipe a bit more and then post it here -- it is the best bread my bread machine has ever made Most of the time I just use it to knead the dough because it turns out better in the oven, but there are a few recipes that are just as good in the bread maker.)

My kids were so excited, they could hardly wait the 3 hours it took for the bread to rise and bake.   The bread was ready for dinner and was devoured pretty quickly -- my oldest son said it was too soft and made me toast it, but otherwise, there were no complaints!

The next day, we made country biscuits, using my Star Biscuit recipe (which can easily be adapted into scones, by the way -- we made orange-raisin scones last night).  A friend of mine sent us some Cars 2 cookie cutters (my kids love Cars), so we used them and then had a great laugh eating the characters after they were finished baking.
  
Cars 2 Cookie-Cutter Country Biscuits

2 comments:

  1. I would love to have my 4 year old eventually cook for me - though her raisin, flour and oat concoction the other day didn't do it for me - but I far prefer her yen to clean of late!

    love the car biscuits - I think I would like to have races with them before eating them but that would probably just encourage me to then have races to see who could eat them first and that would not be responsible

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    1. This is my favourite comment ever. I think next time we will have races with them!!

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