Baking with toddlers

I love cooking and baking, and it's important to me that my children, even if they don't necessarily share that love, at least reach competence in that area. Given that home economics is now no longer required or even taught in most middle schools, it's totally all on me and Ephiny to transmit all of those skills.

I think a really good way to do this is to start involving your kids in what they can do as soon as you can, even if that "help" is in reality more of a hindrance. As such, Jolly has been putting away dishes from the dishwasher and rinsing/drying fruit/vegetables and stirring things for a long while now. A lot of other kids have play kitchens, and we don't, because Jolly gets to play in the kitchen that the grown ups get to play in, courtesy of an Ikea stepstool (not the kid size one, but the adult size one that makes it possible for a toddler-size person to reach the counters).

Recently, baking has been a top request of things to do and it's been really, really fun and it's also cool how much more he's capable of doing now! I do the measuring and egg-cracking and the spooning of the batter into the final baking container, as well as putting into the oven, and Jolly does the greasing of the pan or lining it with papers, the dumping in and some stirring and also turning the mixer ON. (For whatever reason, he does not like to turn the mixer off yet.)

Things I learned:

• Nigella Lawson is totally right when she says toddlers have an inordinate passion for mashing bananas. Channel that passion. A potato masher is perfect and you will have to pry it out of your toddler's tightly clenched fists with promises that they will get to eat banana bread soon but only if they let you use the banana they so helpfully mashed.
  
• Banana bread is a really good thing to have on hand, especially if you can make a more healthful version that you don't feel terrible about eating for breakfast (read on!)... and even more convenient if baked as muffins.
  
• Baking at toddler speed means that if you preheat the oven right as you get started, even our pathetic oven will have come up to temperature by the time you're ready to put things in to bake!
  
• Having a toddler totally means that someone can handle the spills of batter/dough even if the adult cannot consume raw eggs at this special expectant time in her life.
  
• Toddlers will totally enjoy eating the dough, perhaps even more than they will enjoy eating the end product. If the prospect of raw egg consumption bothers you (it doesn't us, but I can understand how it might), get pasteurized eggs/egg substitute, or even use premade dough that you can get in rolls, which is totally safe to eat and can still be rolled and mixed and have fun extras kneaded in by you/your kid.
  
• On that vein, feel free to take shortcuts that you ordinarily wouldn't consider taking in order to facilitate the experience being fun, foolproof and commensurate with attention span of your kid. Right now, that means we either make simple quickbreads or cookies... or I'll employ a cake mix, which is something that would otherwise make me clutch my pearls in horror. I figure we can work our way up in complexity as Jolly's abilities grow and by the time he's in elementary school we can make pie crust and use the creme brulee torch. :)
  
• If you do use cake mixes, buy them on sale to make it more cost-effective. In my pre-toddler life I really didn't pay any attention to this sort of thing, but the cake mixes are always going on sale and frequently have coupons issued, and they keep forever, so there's no reason to pay full price.
  
• Also, if you do use cake mixes, consider splitting a bag of cake mix into thirds so you can make a batch of 8 cupcakes at a time, which helps bring the frequency with which your toddler will want to bake in line with the amount of cupcakes that your family can actually consume/give away. As pointed out by Swistle's recent post, thirds are really an easy division to make because you just use one egg, a third of a cup water, and a scant two tablespoons of oil (or, a tablespoon of applesauce and two teaspoons of oil if you prefer). Also, 8 is a large enough number that your child can learn the cardinal principle of counting from it.
  
• If your oven has an oven light, gosh darn it thank your lucky stars because it means you don't have to yank the oven door open to satisfy toddler curiosity about the baking progress (and lowering the temp!) many times throughout. This will be a non-optional feature for our future oven when we get a gas stove sometime in a year or so.
  
• It's a good idea to have a ton of different sprinkles and colored sugars on hand in shakeable bottles. You can ice the item in question and your toddler can rain sprinkles over it to decorate, forming a very pleasing assembly line. Lots of opportunity to learn about colors and shapes, and also numbers.
  
• Generally, it's a good idea to have a lot of choices. Different colored muffin/cupcake papers, different flavors of cakemix, different flavors of frosting. Toddlers LOVE making choices almost as much as they love mashing bananas.
  
• Don't give your toddler sprinkles in a jar that doesn't have a perforated lid for sprinkling. He will just dump the whole thing out onto a hapless cupcake.
  
• It's okay if the sprinkles got dumped out because you had the foresight to put all of the cupcakes into a high-sided roasting pan, so the mess is contained! And then you can just dip your cupcakes into the roasting pan of sprinkles to coat them.
  
• It's also okay if the sprinkles got dumped out because it turns out that toddlers really like eating fistfuls of sprinkles, solving your longstanding issue of "what on earth do we do with all of those baby shower themed sprinkles that don't even taste good"?
  
• For transport to friends to solve your resultant baked good overpopulation problems, use old yogurt containers. Those extra large yogurt vats are perfect because they nestle three cupcakes, and regular yogurt vats contain a nice number of cookies to share. Your kid can also be prevented from mashing the tops of the sprinkle bottles into the tops of the cupcakes by using such a high sided container, but I don't think that's really necessary since they wipe off reasonably well.
  

So, my favorite thing to make is definitely banana bread muffins.
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Not-Horrifically-Bad-For-You Banana Bread (or Muffins)  

Dry ingredients:
1.5 cups whole wheat flour. (We use 1 cup regular whole wheat and half cup of the albino "white" whole wheat. If you don't have that, but like a slightly lighter flavor, I'd suggest 1.25 cups regular whole wheat and .25 cups regular white all purpose flour.)
.5 to .75 cups Splenda, depending on how sweet you like it and whether you're adding sweet stir-ins. (If you don't have a parent trying to avoid gestational diabetes, you could obviously go ahead and use actual sugar.)
2 tsps baking powder
.5 tsp salt
.5 tsp cinnamon

Wet ingredients:
Enough bananas in any state of ripe to overripe to yield approximately 1.5 cups mashed. The recipe I'm basing this off said  3 bananas, we usually need 4-5, I think because organic bananas tend to be a bit puny.
.5 cups applesauce (the unsweetened kind, otherwise, adjust sweetener accordingly)
2 eggs (or 1/2 cup eggbeaters if you're watching your cholesterol)
1 generous tbsp vanilla or any other flavor extracts that appeal. Next time I'm trying a splash of rosewater or orange blossom water along with the vanilla.
 
Optional stir-ins:
walnuts or pecans, however much your toddler wants
raisins, however much your toddler wants (alternatively: chocolate chips, however much your spouse wants)

1. Instruct your toddler to find the Big Stool.
   
2. Preheat oven to 350 F.
   
3. Pour a tiny bit of canola oil into baking container (loaf pan or 12 cupcake pan) and have toddler distribute it with a brush. Check their work.
   
4. Measure out flour and sugar, have toddler dump in a bowl and stir.
   
5. Measure out baking powder, salt and cinnamon, have toddler dump into sifter and have toddler turn sifter crank to send baking powder and company loose into the bowl. You can skip the sifter if your baking powder hasn't gotten clumpy.
   
6. Have your toddler stir all the dry ingredients in the bowl. Do a parental assist or restir if you notice the cinnamon is not evenly distributed because that means the baking powder and salt aren't either.
   
7. Peel bananas with help from your toddler, and put them into a separate big bowl for wet ingredients. Bottom should be flat and wide enough to accommodate the potato masher.
   
8. Have toddler mash bananas with potato masher. Go have a bathroom break or clean up the kitchen or whatever, since this is totally The Best Part and can take however long you want it to!
   
9. Pry potato masher out of reluctant toddler hands. Add an additional parental stir. Put potato masher out of sight in sink to prevent persistent requests to use it again.
   
10. Measure out the applesauce, have toddler dump.
    
11. Crack the eggs into the bowl. Ask toddler how many eggs there are. Have toddler put eggshells into compost bucket. Talk about compost bucket and how it's not the trash can and how the worms can eat the eggshells and make dirt.
    
12. Measure vanilla, have toddler smell and dump.
    
13. Have toddler stir all the wet ingredients with a wooden spoon.
    
14. Have toddler dump dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, and then stir. This is harder resistance stirring and might require more assists from you. Distract from this by having toddler make decisions about add-ins.
    
15. Stir in nuts or raisins in whatever quantity is pleasing to you. You can let your toddler do fistfuls since the quantity is really irrelevant here.
    
16. Bake 50 minutes or until skewer inserted in becomes clean. Muffins need a bit less time, but I'm loath to provide a recommendation since our oven is very very sad and certainly does not correspond to physical reality of anyone else's oven. Just check often and take them out when they look deeply golden brown and yummy. Be sure to admire with toddler and discuss changes!
    
17. Cool. Sing some songs about baking in the meantime.
18. Release from pan with a spatula or butter knife while your toddler flails his arms with joy.
    
19. Eat, with a glass of milk on the side! Delicious smeared with peanut butter or nutella if one did not add nuts or chocolate to the dough itself, or if one is a total hedonist. Also useful if your toddler is adamant that they want a "cupcake!" and they (somehow, mysteriously) know that cupcakes have frosting.
    
20. Put extras in a basket with a clean kitchen towel (more opportunities for counting!) and feel deeply domestic when you have breakfast the next morning.

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We are going to be absolutely golden by the time bake sales manifest themselves in our future. I can hardly wait!

Also, I believe that knowing how to bake (and cook), while perhaps a slightly frivolous skill, greatly increases the appeal of a person, man or woman, on the dating scene. Also, the precise following instructions that comes with baking leads to success in Organic Chemistry Laboratory later on. I want my children to be fully prepared for all eventualities in their future lives!