Cooking with Kids: Little hands are a great help with these baking recipes
Vanilla stars - perfect for junior chefs!
There are lots of nice reasons to get children into the kitchen, to help with dinner, or to bake a cake, or a tray of biscuits. Firstly, they usually really enjoy it, but there is also ample research to say it helps to foster enjoyment in food later in life. Also children generally eat more of something if they prepare it themselves. This is equally true of cake as it is of something savoury.
I often bake with my niece and nephews, and they love it, they are all assigned jobs, breaking up the chocolate bars by banging them on the side of the table is one of the favourites. But recently I suggested we bake some brown bread, and their enthusiasm was not what it usually is. I realised it was not the baking with me that they loved so much but the baking of the cake. It made me realise that I needed to make the bread tasks accessible and fun to them, but also to add something to make the recipe a little more appealing. We ended up making a batch of cheesy brown scones and that went down much better. They loved cutting out their individual scones and sprinkling some cheese on each one.
