Getting your kids to help you bake and cook can be heaps of fun, if you’re in the right mood (this means nice and relaxed with no time pressures and plenty of cleaning products!). You don’t have to make anything fancy, but your kids can learn about weighing, mixing, rolling, cutting out shapes, cooking and then the really fun bit, decorating.

If you want to make life easy, you can buy mixes for muffins, brownies, cakes, cupcakes and cookies. These generally just require you to add simple ingredients like butter, milk, water, eggs or oil and mix them up. Alternatively you can use a simple recipe from the Edmonds cookbook, which is available at your local New World, or choose from our wide range of recipes on this website.

Chips, chunks or bits?

Many favourite recipes involve chocolate, but if you stand and look at the selection in the baking aisle, you may become bewildered at the choice. Basically the differences are:

• Compound chocolate is easy to melt as it has added vegetable fat. Melted compound chocolate is good for decorating and drizzling.
• Cooking chocolate gives a rich dark flavour and is perfect for baking in chocolate cakes.
• Chocolate chips, bits and buds are made from cooking chocolate and keep their shape when baked. They’re good for decorating too.

If in doubt, the higher the percentage of cocoa solids means the richer and darker the chocolate. The higher the percentage of cocoa butter and vegetable fat, the easier it is to melt.

The icing on the cake

Once you have chosen your recipe, mixed it up, licked the bowl, put it in the oven and cleaned up the children, you can start to think about decorations for when your creation has cooled.

Probably the easiest way to decorate muffins, slices, cakes and cookies is to stick goodies onto melted chocolate or icing. Two easy icing recipes are:

• Buttercream icing – beat together 250g butter, 125g icing sugar, a teaspoon of vanilla essence and 2 teaspoons of milk. (Halve this recipe if you only have a few cupcakes to decorate.)
• Glacé icing – mix together a cup of icing sugar and a tablespoon of boiling water.

You can then add food colouring to make the icing really garish – from lemon yellow to girly pink or grass green.

From here, you are only limited by your imagination! There is a great range of decorations you can squish into the topping…either put out everything you have or ration them to just a few, depending on how brave you are. Some ideas are:

• Multicoloured 100’s and 1000’s (non pareils) in either hail or little ball shapes
• Silver balls (silver cachous) or mini marshmallows
• Coloured sprinkles and unusual sugar shapes like dolphins and dinosaurs
• Chocolate hail or chocolate chips
• Dried fruit, like raisins, cherries or dried cranberries.

The only thing left to do is to put the kettle on for a nice cup of tea, then sit back, rest your weary feet and enjoy the fruits of your labours.

Endorsed by our New World Nutritionist  ||   Proudly Partnering with Parents Centre

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