Cooking with Kids: ideas to use up that excess Easter chocolate
Cookies and cornflake buns - easy, simple and just watch the kids get involved!
It is Easter and most children are tucking into more chocolate than normal. If you want to use up some of the excess chocolate and keep young people busy for a half an hour or so the chocolate nests are an accessible recipe. They can be filled with a variety of things, but the little eggs keep up the Easter festivities.
There are many different cookie shapes that can be made for Easter, bunnies, eggs, hearts, baskets, flowers, the list goes on.
These cookies work well for decorating and making them a little thicker, about a ¼ of an inch, helps to have a solid base to decorate. When baking it is best that they are a pale golden colour.
You can break open one to see if it is baked through. Baking them too much will result in hard cookies.
Icing pens make decorating more accessible and give very good results. Large supermarkets often have them in their baking sections.
A fun excuse to break out the cookie-cutters! Servings Preparation Time Cooking Time Total Time Course Ingredients 1 tbsp lemon juice and the zest of the lemon 1 small egg 150g soft butter 150g caster sugar 375g self-raising flour To decorate: different colour icing pens Method Zest the lemon carefully. Crack your egg into a cup or a small jug. Stir the lemon juice and zest into the egg and leave this to one side until you are ready to use it a bit later. Ask an adult to help you mix the butter and sugar in a mixer. It will take a minute or two as it needs to get soft and creamy. With a wooden spoon mix about half of the egg mixture into the butter. Add two big spoons of the flour at the same time. Do this again so all of the egg is mixed with the butter mixture. Now stir in the rest of the flour until it is mixed as well. Lay another sheet of parchment onto a counter or table. Place your cookie dough onto it, and with your hands press and knead the dough for a minute. Now wrap it up in the parchment and put it in the fridge to cool down. It will take about an hour. Ask an adult to heat the oven to 180 degrees and to help you cut out a square of baking parchment to cover a flat baking tray. Get your Easter cookie cutters ready! Take the dough out of the fridge and cut off about a quarter of it off the big block. Sprinkle some flour on a table or counter. Roll the dough out with a rolling pin so it is about as thick as your baby finger, or just less than a ¼ of an inch. Use your cutters and cut out the cookies and gently put them on your baking tray. Bake them for about 8 minutes. They could be a very pale golden colour when you take them out of the oven. Ask an adult to help you take them out. Once they have cooled you can put them on a wire rack to finish cooling. Decorate the cold cookies with your icing pens.Easter Lemon Cookies
A handy way to make use of some excess Easter eggs! Servings Preparation Time Cooking Time Total Time Course Ingredients 120g of leftover easter egg chocolate, smashed into small pieces 30g of butter 100g of cornflakes Small chocolate eggs Method Put 12 bun cases into a bun tin. Put the broken chocolate and the butter into a saucepan. Heat the saucepan over a low heat until everything has melted together. Put the cornflakes into a big bowl. Pour half of the chocolate mixture over the cornflakes and mix everything together. Scoop the rest of the chocolate out of the saucepan with a spatula or wooden spoon and stir this in as well. All of the cornflakes should be covered. Spoon the mixture into your bun cases and make a small hollow in the centre of each one so they look like little birds' nests. Place the bun tin into the fridge so the nests can firm up. Put the eggs into each nest before you serve them to people.Leftover Easter egg chocolate nests
Sunflowers provide us with lots of things in the kitchen. We can use sunflower oil for cooking or eat the seeds in salads or as a snack. Sunflowers can grow as tall as a person. Now is a good time of year to plant them. The seeds can be planted in small pots inside and then moved out in a few weeks. When moving them outside it is best to put the small plants up against a wall that gets lots of sun. You can watch them grow taller and taller over the summer months.
