Baking with Kids

 The 23rd was a baking day for me, as we were preparing for Christmas celebrations. Since we’re on the GAPS diet and we don’t eat any refined flours or sugars, we had to make all of our own goodies. No big deal, I like baking. 🙂 What I don’t like is having all of the kids crowd around the counter, complaining about who gets to dump in the vanilla and who gets to lick the honey spoon. I’ve been baking with my kids ever since they were old enough to have their high chair scooted next to me in the kitchen (with measuring cups in hand!), and have wondered how to deal with this dilemma. This year, I came up with a solution!

 

I pulled out the craft stuff, and told my kids to make paper chains so that I could bake with 1 kid at a time.

 

 

Usually, there would be 2 kids at the table, 1 helping me cook, and 1 helping out around the house somehow. Here is Farm Boy 2 doing the laundry:

Farm Princess LOVES cooking with Mommy and ate it up!!

 

Farm Boy 1 loves baking but he really got into the craft project. 

This was perfect, because when I’ve attempted to have them all bake before, he got bored when it wasn’t his turn to be mixing or dumping something into the bowl, and then he’d get into trouble by dumping things that shouldn’t be dumped in, spilling things, etc. (extra baking soda in a recipe is never a good thing ;)). This simple craft project kept him out of trouble! 🙂

The kids preferred helping make candies over cookies, because they got to lick the batter. 🙂 They each got a chance to lick the honey spoon (don’t worry, I got a new one after that!), and to try samples of whatever they made.

And when all was said and done, we had this lovely plate of goodies:

and some chocolates in the fridge, and this cake for Jesus:

 

and this beautiful paper chain:

I’d say it was a day well-spent!

 

This post was shared at Tip Day Thursday.