Recently I've been researching Montessori activities to enhance the time my son and I spend together. If you're at home with your children, it's definitely worth checking out some of the ideas from dedicated blogs. Here's an example of such an activity, promoting self-confidence, responsibility and safety in the kitchen, and the tasty rewards of hard work.
Baking Sour Cream Chocolate Chip Muffins with a Toddler...
In an attempt to be more intentional in my time with my son we did some cooking and baking together today. It takes a lot of time and patience, but I would encourage you to try cooking with your child! My son is a toddler, so I measured out all the ingredients ahead of time. I talked to my son as I measured the ingredients out and talked to him about what we needed to make the muffins.
Here are all of our ingredients laid out. This is really important with a toddler because he is on a step stool while we are baking, so I can't leave his side once we get started.
There are some loose chocolate chips for a snack while baking and mixing. :) I left the stick of butter whole, and helped my son cut it to the right amount. (We used a dull knife.) Then I microwaved the butter while we started mixing the ingredients.
Two mixing bowls and two spatulas ready for mixing!
My son put the paper cups in the cupcake pan.
Now for mixing the dry ingredients! (This was not a perfect experience...he tried to mix the ingredients with his hands...and he also is a very strong mixer, so some ingredients made it to the counter rather than the bowl, as you can see from the picture!)
He mixed together the wet ingredients, but needed some assistance with this because he was losing focus and wanted to eat the chocolate chips.
Dry and wet ingredients mixed together and chocolate chips added! Ready to go in the cupcake pan.
This time I added the batter to the cupcake pan, but maybe next time I will have him do it. Now the muffins are ready to go in the oven!
Muffins done! I think someone enjoyed them (Let's be honest if it has chocolate in it, who doesn't like it!)!
Pizza making time!
I made the dough for us to make some pizza tonight. You can also buy dough at Publix if you don't want to make it yourself. It is really easy to make it from scratch though. I use my KitchenAid Mixer, which makes it really easy!
Pizza making station.
I moved the ingredients off of the pan until we are ready to use them. I don't have a small rolling pin, but my son patted it out most of the way and I helped him thin it out more before we moved to putting the sauce on.
Time to add the sauce! I made the mistake of just giving him the spoon with the bowl of sauce, so after he dipped the spoon in the sauce he started digging the spoon into the dough. CHANGE OF PLANS! I dumped the sauce out onto the dough and showed him how to spread it out. This worked a lot better!
He did a great job spreading out the sauce.
The cheese was too much for him...I showed him how to put the cheese on the pizza and he proceeded to eat whatever I put down. So I put the cheese on for him and gave him a bowl of cheese to eat. :)
Baking and cooking with a toddler means being flexible and not getting upset when things don't work out or go as planned. It is good for there to be a mess! A mess means a fun time and a mess can be cleaned up.
Another change in plans! The pizza ended up being a pizza turnover because I couldn't get it off the cutting board so I folded it over to get it off the board. Next time I would have him just do it directly on the sheet we are cooking on.
Adult pizza!
