cooking with toddlers/preschoolers

katiecoodle

peppermint creams are good - they like cutting them out. It's best to use the powdered egg white tho, I think it's pasteurized or something...
little ones basically love decorating, rather than 'cooking' - so yes someone suggested decorating rich tea biscuits - it's such a fab idea - they all LOVE doing that, although have a dustpan & brush handy to sweep up all the sprinkles...worse than glitter!

debbym

I used to be in charge of the make and do stuff for our toddlers group
Here are some of the things we used to do:

rich tea biscuits/icing sugar and water/sprinkles and dolly mixture size sweets
bread dough
pizzas (mushrooms are good to practise cutting with a knife - plastic of course!)
fairy cakes
biscuit dough for shape cutting
sandwiches - cheesy spread/marmite/jam to practise spreading
rock cakes or similar
fruit kebabs (thread fruit onto plastic drnk straws)


most cooking websites have a section for cooking with kids you will have to decide whether you want something to actually cook or just assemble IYSWIM also some halls charge more if you start using loads of fuel; thats why we stopped doing this in the end, the committee decided that an extra £10 a week was not worth the activity..

You will also need to get a list together of any children with allergies and warn people in advance of what you are making each week and check with any mum/carer before kids touch stuff - we used to have one poor kid with egg allergy and he couldn't even touch an empty egg box let alone an egg itself without it setting him off...

Yvonnerj

LooniesMum wrote: »

I have 2 children aged 5 and 3. I am allergic to wheat, milk and egg so everything we make at home contains none of those! Cooking without egg is not a problem for making biscuits but is a bit more tricky for cake. We have a couple of recipes that work well for cake but might be costly to do with a large group because of the special ingredients. We use Dove's Farm wheat free flour and soya milk. We have never found any satisfactory substitute for egg, although a mashed ripe banana works well in fruit cake type recipes! You could buy an allergy cook book (or borrow from the library) to get some more ideas on cooking without egg. Hope that helps!

You can get egg replacer from health food shops - we use Orgran 'No Egg' Natural Egg replacer (there are others available). It makes good cakes, even with soya milk and dairy-free margarine, but I've never tried it with wheat-free flour. You can use it to make pancakes too.

Its also cheap - under £3 for the equivalent of 66 eggs.

Back to general toddler stuff...

I've found it easier making cakes than biscuits with a toddler 'helping', as the mixture is runnier, so easier for them to stir. Both are fun. Breadmakers are wonderful for dough - to knead / shape as rolls, or for pizza bases to add toppings to. Jelly and ice lollies take a long time to set / freeze, but are fun to do at home. Playdough is a good thing to cook, you can get different children doing different colours.