December 17, 2010

Baking with kids

The two things you need to bake with kids are patience and low expectations. To be nice, let's say adjusted expectations.

Only teenagers with as big a baking passion as your own are willing to decorate a gingerbread house for longer than an episode of This Old House. Toddlers want to mix all the colored sugars together after ten minutes, twenty if you are lucky. Elementary school kids can focus for half an hour or an hour, but never on what you want, and never with the detail of Martha Stewart. Teens, on the other hand, are practically adults. If they are interested in baking, they need only the guidance of any new baker. Take advantage of their free labor, but supervise.

Whenever the kids can stand on a stool by themselves and keep their fingers out of their mouths, they are old enought to start baking. At a year and a half, my son proudly mashed the bananas for banana bread. He moved on to "dumping" measured ingredients from spoons and cups and mixing. Now five (and three-quarters!), he can measure dry ingredients, but needs me to hold the container sideways to get a full spoonful of salt or baking powder. He knows how to level, but hasn't quite grasped the finer point of keeping the implement of leveling, well, level. He needed to be shown how to do something, and I needed to be patient (or fake it) while he learned.

There is much for kids to do beyond mashing the bananas, including: measuring (hand them the measuring spoon or cup and count the correct number with them if they ar very young), rolling, cutting cookies and biscuits (be perpared to have lots of scraps), cracking eggs into a cup, separating eggs, whisking dry or wet ingredients, mixing batter, mixing dough, using the mixer (just turning it on at first), using the bench scraper to clean up, kneading. They are excellent at licking beaters, playing in the water for washing the dishes, an leaving you with most of the mess. Be prepared to supervise, guide, direct and rescue. And be patient, or fake it well. (Strangely, I can fake being patient very well, but cannot actually be patient.)

Some days, my son has no interest in baking. "Do you want to make scones?" "No, you can do it, Mommy." That's his answer for any work he doesn't want to do. ("Pick up the Legos." "You can do it, Mommy.") My current theory is the old faithful recipes no longer hold his attention. He wants the new. I've learned to ask whenever I bake if he wants to join me.

The cooking and family magazines always describe scenes of domestic decorating bliss at the holidays. This is a complete lie. It's decorating chaos, even with one kid. Expect the pre-schoolers to get bored after fifteen minutes. Expect the elementary schoolers to get bored after half an hour. Someone will mix all the decorations together; keep some in reserve. No one will carefully place decorations in the perfect spot, except one kid who will probably melt down when another child "helps" him or her and "ruins everything." If you want the cookies or cakes to be perfect, do it yourself. Children, especially preschoolers, don't have the fine motor control of adults. Marsha from the Hot Water Bath blog won't even tell her kids she's baking if she wants it to look good.

Again: patience, and know what the kids are capable of and interested in.