Summer holidays are only about a month away and if you’re a parent, chances are you’re already fretting about how to keep you children meaningfully engaged during the vacations. So what happens after they’ve attended their share of cricket camps, sleepovers with school friends, picnics with cousins, swimming coaching, and visits to the grandparents’? Why not bake with them? Do you know that a lot of learning actually goes into something as fun as baking? Wondering how? Read on.
Math- Math skills are boosted as children count out ingredients, measure and weigh them and use fractions.
Science- Kids learn in simple ways the chemical process of baking, what each ingredient does to the batter to complete a chemical equation, and so on.
Art- Kids’ creativity is at its peak when baking. Allow them to decorate their goodies, pipe their cookies and use a lot of colour and of course their imagination!
Vocabulary- Children are introduced to a world of words that goes beyond “mix” and “stir, thus, building up their vocabulary and language skills.
Social Skills- When your kids bake with you, their siblings, and their friends, they learn to communicate better and adapt to a different social environment. They learn to share, lead, compete and cooperate.
Health, Nutrition and Safety- Baking can in fact help you focus on various safety aspects in the kitchen. From learning the need to use gloves, potholders, and wire racks to understanding the ingredients that go into baking and their health/nutritional properties, kids take in more than you can imagine when they’re engaged in an activity such as baking.
Coordination Skills- Sifting flour, rolling balls of dough before placing them on the baking tray boost bilateral coordination. Sifting flour into a large bowl trains kids to use both hands together. Children require this skill to tie shoelaces, cut with scissors and draw a line with a ruler, for example.
Visual and Spatial Perception- Visual perception skills and spatial perception skills are developed when your child has to learn to place the cookie cutters on the dough in a way that does not “waste space” or when he pours batter into cupcake liners.
And if you’re worried about all hell breaking loose, you might want to know that they say good moms have sticky floors, messy kitchens, laundry piles, dirty ovens and happy kids!
Chef Vinesh’s Recipe for the Week
Hazelnut Cookies
105 g Butter
189 g Castor Sugar
69g Eggs
6 g Vanilla Essence
1 g Lemon Peel
2 g Cinnamon
216 g Chopped Hazelnut
240 g Flour
Method:
- In a large bowl, mix the butter and the sugar.
- To this mixture, add in the eggs, vanilla essence, cinnamon and lemon peel.
- Once well incorporated, add in the chopped hazelnut and the flour.
- Put this on a tray covered with plastic and roll out to 1 cm thickness.
- Let this rest in the refrigerator overnight.
- Cut in using a cookie cutter.
- Bake at 170° C for 14 minutes.
- Serve with love!
*Picture Credit: Some images for the post have been sourced from pixabay.com