Kids in the Kitchen

The joys and challenges of baking with children - five lessons to improve anyone’s baking.

Hello and welcome back to Bake Experiments - where we play with flavours and techniques. With a bit of baking history & folklore thrown in too.

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Welcome to the Easter holidays. I have been on two Easter trails, two playdates, two park trips and played 7,000 board games.

There is no space to recipe test. My regular intricate layer cakes and patisserie have been cast aside for cupcakes with sprinkles and cartoon characters.

When it comes to baking with kids, I consider myself an expert, with many years experience.

My son designs cakes and suggests flavours for macarons, my daughter could help make choux by the time she was three. I’ve even baked with other people’s children. Gasp.

While baking with kids isn’t considered a pastry chef technique, it takes a great deal of skill to pull off. And can improve your baking even when the kids aren’t around.

Here are five lessons, utilising pastry chef methods, to help make baking with kids a smooth and enjoyable experience. And if you don’t have kids? Trust me, it will be helpful anyway.

Lesson 1: Mise en place

Mise en place, meaning to “put in place” or “everything in its place”, is a process to make baking or cooking more efficient. Before you start baking, read your recipe in full, weigh out your ingredients and place them in the order you need them.

It’s why the best recipes order ingredients as you need them. The idea being to stop you from running around the kitchen like a headless chicken at an inopportune moment - usually when you are burning caramel.

This very much applies to when you are baking with children too. It makes the whole process run much more smoothly.

And there is nothing children love more than weighing out ingredients. I have to ruthlessly monitor mine during, to ensure they are taking turns appropriately.

My son loves to weigh flour and sugar, my daughter loves to use the teaspoon set for cinnamon, vanilla or baking powder. Their own assigned little roles.

All sweetness and light, until they start fighting over who gets to split and weigh the eggs, inevitably knocking over the perfectly organised row of bowls and splattering yolk up the walls.

Lesson 2: Mitigate the mess

With children or not, when it comes to baking, there will be mess. You will get flour and sprinkles on the floor. If you don’t, you or the child is not having fun. Which arguably, is the whole point of the exercise.

However, there are ways to mitigate the mess…

Much, much, much, MUCH, repetition means that I can say to my children, “what do we do before we start baking?” and they will both run to the bathroom in an orderly queue to wash their hands.

That’s not a useful tip. I’m just really proud of it.

Anyhoo, over the years, I have let go of that ideal - the one where you look spectacular in domestic bliss, with a cute dress, flicky hair, perfectly scrubbed children and a tray of drool worthy patisserie. All those celebrity pastry chefs are lying in their perfect curation.

I no longer wish to cry into that beautiful, but now chocolate stained outfit, and I always wear plain clothes, with my hair tied back, no jewellery on and a plain black apron. All the things you have to do in pastry school. Sometimes my chef blacks make a reappearance.

And while baking, it helps to think like a pastry chef and clear up your station as you go.

At appropriate intervals, I shout: ‘let’s clean up our station!’ at my kids like a drill sergeant and they love it. The amount of cleaning they actually do rather than running around in a flap is questionable. But at least it gives me space to tidy up a bit.

For very young children, I often give them a separate space where I bring the flour bowl to mix, cupcakes to be decorated, etc, and keep everything else away from them.

This works when baking as an adult too. If your kitchen allows, separate sections for separate jobs makes cooking easier. For example, I am fortunate enough to have an island. One end is for preparation, weighing and mixing. The other end is for decoration, and ‘plating’.

Admittedly, it is rather stressful when colouring and barbies randomly appear in your plating section as you are trying to serve dinner.

Lesson 3: Keep calm, and carry on

I once attempted to make cinnamon rolls with two six-year-olds and a three-year-old.

While they enjoyed punching the dough, it was quite difficult to keep their attention through something so tricky.

My stress levels certainly rose as they heavy-handedly rolled out the dough. Repeatedly hissing ‘stop pushing the air out’, as my left eye began to twitch.

The ensuing sword fight with floury rolling pins may have pushed me to the edge.

But, I took a deep breath, calmly but firmly asked them to stop fighting. And we did get some nice cinnamon rolls in the end

Taking a deep breath and remaining calm, is key to baking success.

Things will go wrong. Things will burn, you will under bake a sponge at some point.

Rather than throwing said sponges across the kitchen (although no judgement if you do), take a deep breath, and decide your next course of action.

Will you re bake your sponges? Or cut out the under baked middle and use your sponge for a trifle or bread pudding instead? There is always a solution.

Lesson 4: Learn to let go of perfection

Following pastry chef methods can be helpful when baking with children. Yet, there are some things you have to let go.

Namely perfectionism, and care for aesthetics.

After many hours practicing piping, I find this challenging. But if you allow your child (or your inner child) to unleash their creativity, they may just surprise you.

My son, at age seven, made this cake, and took this photo. Pretty good for a child right?

Admittedly he was, erm, heavily supervised. And there were definitely some artistic tensions between us. The commentary ran something like this;

Me: "Are you sure you want to place the orange half there?"
Him: "Yes, I do"
Me: "Maybe the berries might work better here darling"
Him: "No!! Muuuum... Oh yeah, they do look better there"
Me: "Don't put your finger there, you've squidged the buttercream!"
Him: "Ooops. Sorry. Oh, it’s yummy."

And later…

Me: "Be careful with the camera!! It's expensive. Don't do that to the lens!"
Him: "Sorry... I don't like this red ribbon. I only want green ones."
Me: "But it won't look Christmassy without the red ribbon"
Him: "I don't want it to look Christmassy!"
Me: "Fine. Do what you want... Oh, this picture is actually quite good."

Lesson 5: Enjoy yourself, even when you are a grown up

Jokes and challenges aside, there are few things in my life that bring me greater joy than baking with the children.

The afternoon we made pesto pastry snails, or ‘healthier’ peanut butter cookies, which they only ate because I loaded them with smarties, or my son’s excitement when I showed him how to make bubbly honeycomb. These are moments I hold so dear to my heart.

Pesto pastry snails

How much longer do I have? Until they are grumpy teenagers, out with their friends or hiding in their bedrooms. Until they don’t want to bake with me anymore. Five years at most? It is all so fleeting.

Wiping egg off the wall seems a small price to pay to have their interest in one of my greatest passions.

I can only hope and pray that maybe, as they grow, they develop an interest in food for themselves. That maybe I have taught them a thing or two, which will set them in good stead for the real world.

So, if you are baking with kids, or just a big kid at heart, keep calm, let go of perfection, and enjoy yourself. The cake will still taste delicious.

In Cooking the Stacks - Cruella’s and Cobblers

In my sister publication, Cooking the Stacks, I’ve been having a right old time of it.

I’ve been cooking the recipes of the amazing

Rebecca Blackwell

and her Let’s Get Lost stack. Including my first ever taste of all American classic, the Cobbler, and a little experiment with Rebecca’s French Cruller doughnuts (renamed Cruella’s by my family).

Cruller doughnuts are traditionally deep fried. But I baked them in the oven like Yorkshire puddings. They puffed up a treat and tasted tremendous!

Check out the full write up:

A week of Getting Lost

This week, I am cooking from

Miles Dickinson

and his Flavour Hack stack, showcasing what a modern British cook creates in their kitchen. Newsletter coming on Sunday, so do subscribe!

Until next time…