Hello Friends,

I want to share with you a fun and learning day, with my 27 months daughter, we had together Toddler Cooking Activities to prepare our decorated cookies for this Easter.

Easter is coming, and despite the quarantine days that we all have this Easter time, I believe that in any home that celebrates Easter this week is full of cooking activities and preparation about it. Any mother does her best preparing healthy and tasty foods for any day, but in the celebrated days’ one of the mothers gives the maximum in cooking time. At least for me is so. Cooking for the family needs commitment, but it also is a fun time, notably for those who love cooking. And, if you don’t like cooking, there is a way to enjoy it. Do you know what? Try to cook with your children, involve them in easy things to do in your cooking process, and let your kids help you. You may think that the children must keep away from the kitchen because it’s dangerous. I agree with you about the fact of being risky sometimes but involved our toddlers in cooking activities, which means that they are under our supervision, and the recipe to do is simple and away from the hazard area of the kitchen. You can start anytime to try cooking with your little one.

Why Is Impressive Cooking For The Little One?

Our babies like to imitate and learn everything from their parents, and for them, any mom or dad activity is significant in their eyes.

In the first years, both a baby girl and the baby boy likes to imitate her mother in cooking. Playing with pans and pots is one of the preferred games for your little one. How many times your little one pretend cooking pasta or cakes like you? I guess many times, you have clean your carpet, which filled with pasta, rice, and flour. Now, my question is: If our kids like so much playing cooking, why we don’t invest our time to cook together, having fun and at the same time educating about this issue?

We need to educate and help our kids develop their character and learning. For this, some activities need to be part of their daily life, step by step, improving their know-how and raising them healthy overall.

I think that except the fact that all the cooking process is fun, at the same time, I consider significant for my daughter development. Keep in mind that when a child has a healthy and learning activity, he or she will be a better person, and the foundations for the future will be durable. In a few words, for me, toddler cooking activity is at the same time, learning and recreation time.

What New Things Can My Daughter Learn From This Activity?

During the cooking time, many elements can help us to use it as a learning time. What are the things that your child can learn during the cooking time, it almost depends on the child’s age. In my daughter’s age, there are a lot of things that she can learn in cooking activities, be it new concepts or improving things learned before. I’m listing below the mains of them.

Knowing ingredients and foods – In the cooking process, we present our kids with new kinds of food or ingredients. They learn new vocabulary, and at the same time, learn to know fruit, veggies, and much other healthy food.
Sensor development– A child can develop his sensor in cooking time. Touching flour, starch, sugar, eggs, or smelling new aromas like canella, vanilla, etc. is a good learning experience for sensor development.
Motor activities– Involving the children in different processes help them to be more agile in doing certain things. Let your child mix the ingredient by himself or helping you in adding them to your mixing bowl. After several times of cooking together, now my daughter can mix very well and add the ingredients without pouring them around:)
Learning colors– Preparing different recipes to make us encountered many colors, too. If you choose to prepare veggies or fruit recipes, that are also very healthy, you can introduce or repeat the colors with your little one. If you cook some healthy cupcake or cookie, all the coloring decorations are good for learning colors.
Learning kitchen appliances – You may think that kids are too young for this. I don’t think so. Our children are too smart and can learn to know the basics tools for the main recipes that you cook with them.
Learn to eat healthily and love food– Involved children in the cooking process makes them more likely to enjoy and eat the food preparing by themselves.

How We Prepare Our Decorate Easter Cookies?

When I cook with my daughter, I prefer most of the time to prepare healthy recipes, but anytime like, in this case, I can make an exception, just for having fun and enjoy these unusual Easter days.

You can choose to cook anything you like. My daughter and I made cookies. The fun of cooking this Easter was decorating. Considering those decorating elements are adding sugar in our cookies, the cookie dough, better to be with just a little sugar. You can choose any simple cookies receipt that you like, and the decorations will make the difference.

I prepare a light cookie daugh with light olive oil and not much sugar. It is a kind of shortcrust pastry that you can use for cookies, too.

The ingredient that you need for this receipt are:

280-300g all-purpose flour (00)
80 ml light olive oil
100g sugar, if you want sweety cookies, if you prefer light add just half of the size or even more 1/3 of 100g (33g)
One egg and one egg yolk -the egg white keep it for the decoration
One teaspoon baking powder
One lemon zest
1/4 teaspoon salt

How to proceed?

In a bowl mix, the eggs with sugar until the eggs double the volume
Add the olive oil and continue mixing.
Add the lemon zest.
Add the flour mix with baking powder and salt, gradually and start to make the dough. Mix all until the cookie dough is ready.
Turn on the oven, 180°C/350°F.
Prepare a baking tray with baking paper
Dust the workbench with flour so that the dough does not stick. Open the pastry dough to a thickness of 0.5 mm, and start cutting the biscuits with the shapes you prefer for your Easter. Most recommended are bunny, chicken bird, flower, eggs’shape. To make more fun for your little one, you may choose other animal shapes.
You can decorate your cookies before baking. Lubricate with a little milk and sprinkle with colored sprinkles of sugar. In this way, they are healthier for your child. You can make half like this and half let for the later decorating.
Bake the biscuits in the preheated oven for 10-12 minutes, until to get golden.
Let the cookies cool completely before beautify. You can do the decorating the next day, in this way you will have another fun day with your little one.
Separate some cookies for your child before adding decoration sugar because they are healthier like this.

How we decorate the cookies?

We decorated our cookies with Royal Icing and the colored sprinkles of sugar, making them colorfully. There are many other decorating modes using chocolate, Nutella, etc.. You can choose any decorating method you like.

For decorating, we need Royal Icing and different colored sprinkles of sugar.

For the preparation of the Royal Icing I use these ingredients:

One Egg white
One spoon lemon juice
50-100 g Icing sugar

The quantity of Icing Sugar impact in the Thickness of the Royal Icing.

If you want a thin Icing, you can add only 30g of Icing sugar.
For having thicker Royal Icing, add the quantity of Icing sugar, up to 130g. In this quantity, you can write and make writing decoration with Royal Icing.
To prepare the Royal Icing, start to beat with a mixer the egg white, and after a while, add the lemon juice. Mix and add the Icing sugar and beat with a mixer for some minutes, until to create the consistency that you like. I recommend to not add all sugar at once. With this quantity, you can decorate 80 cookies, but this also depends on the size of the cookies.
If you like to use food coloring, then separate the Royal Icing in different bowls and color it as you like.
The colored sprinkles of sugar can help you and your child to decorate using your imagination.

Conclusions

Easter has a strong and love message for humanity, and any believer likes to celebrate what God has done in the Cross for Us. But, This year, the celebration will be a little bit different, since we are in quarantine and can’t meet the others physically. So, let’s have a blessed time in our families, and why not having fun too, cooking with our kids these days. There are many other Indoor activities that, we can make with our toddler, I choose to share our cooking day. I hope that despite the situation, you all stay healthy, prepare your Easter gifts for your little one, and you enjoyed it and have fun with your children, too.

Happy Easter, Everyone!

If you have any questions or like to share your Toddler cooking activities with us, please, feel free and fill the form below.

Thank you for your time.