Baking is a great way for children to learn using their sense of touch. It's also thereupetic and gives them a sense of pride when they present their finished cookies.

At what age can children start baking? You can let children assist you when they're as young as two. They can still stir batter, add premeasured ingredients and help roll out dough. They will make a mess but that's half the fun. That's what aprons are for anyway.

Thie main recipe is for peanut butter cookies, but included are similar recipes modified for oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies.

My daughter started showing an interest in baking at around the age of four. She would cream the sugar and butter together first with a wooden spoon. When her arms got tired, I took over. Of course I put them in the oven and took them out as well.

Now she's 12 and does everything by herself. The first time she made them, she added too much baking soda and that's all you could taste. She never did that again.

I always told everyone that she made them even when she was 4 and she was very proud of herself.

Peanut Butter Cookie Recipe

• 1/2 cup of butter
• 1/2 cup of brown sugar
• 1/2 cup of white sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 cup of peanut butter
• 1/2 teaspoon of salt
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 1 & 1/4 cup of all purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 2 tablespoons of wheat bran (I like to sneak that in.)

First cream the sugar and butter together for a couple minutes as you always do for cookies. This can get tiring so sharing the task makes it more fun. Add the egg and mix until smooth. Add the peanut butter, vanilla and then the dry ingredients.

Once the dry ingredients are added, you can start mixing it with your clean hands until it's the texture of play dough. If it's too mushy, add a little more flour and if it's too dry, add a little water a few drops at a time.

Next, roll into balls. This sounds easy enough but it's tricky for kids to catch onto the fact that all the balls should be the same size. If some are smaller they might burn and if some are too big, they won't cook as fast as the others.

Get a cup of water for dipping your fork in so that it doesn't stick. You do this again after pressing three of four cookies. Traditionally peanut butter cookies are pressed once one way and then again the opposite way so you have a criss-cross pattern.

I let my children do this but at first there were some strange sideways patterns on the cookies or they squished them down a little too hard.

Oatmeal Cookies:

Same as above only use one cup of flour and replace one cup of peanut butter with one cup of oats and 1/8 cup of water. There's no need to shape these so you just drop them on a cookie sheet a couple inches apart.

Chocolate Chip Cookies:

They're almost the same as the peanut butter but omit the peanut butter, decrease the flour to one cup and add one cup of chocolate chips. These are also drop cookies.

Grease the pan very lightly because you don't want extra butter seeping into your cookies or they will flatten. This makes about two dozen cookies and you bake them for at least 10 minutes or until slightly brown on the middle oven rack at 350 F.

Comments

Add New Search RSS

Gokemon   | Editor | 2008-09-12 18:35:12 great idea about letting the kids take credit. they feel a sense of achomlishment, and connection, and pride in doing something well. Then they want to do it more, and that is what we want, to keep our kids involved in the doing good works.

Only registered users can write comments!

Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.12

Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.