Letting our Kids experiment in the Kitchen

Whether it's play dough bake off, making the Christmas biscuits or a cake to take to pony club our children really enjoy baking and experimenting with it. At their science club yesterday they made pancakes. The principle was the following, give them one egg and tell them to beat it. Provide a vast array of flours, liquids, sugars and various other ingredients (cordial, hazlenut paste, food colouring...) let them explore adding different things to the eggs before cooking their mix and seeing whether it's edible*. 

As you can imagine they had a wonderful time. And its something they often ask to do at home too. Maya had a stage of following her own recipes. There were many flat cakes with the texture of pancakes as they often didn't rise as much as she planned. And there was a pastry phase where she made her pastry 'au pif' as the French say by just adding and mixing till she was happy. Sometimes this led to difficult to eat messes and other times to delicious discoveries like her cinnamon pastry base.

A younger Maya making a tart

I admit these experiments haven't always been my favourite moments. They tend to involve a lot of mess in the kitchen and the results aren't always that tasty. However, they give the children such joy in discovery and a sense of accomplishment when things do work that it's hard to resist saying yes. And they're learning through experimentation which is really positive. 

This is also an opportunity to learn something about how they are as learners. While our eldest needed to be left to it and allowed to experiment freely and with little or no constraint, our middle child always preferred having a recipe and a little leeway within that recipe. Perhaps this was due to tasting all his sister's pancake cakes or reflective of the fact he doesn't always like the unpredictable. 

Lotta's chocolate cake with grated butter

Our youngest daughter has just discovered the joy of her own recipes. She comes to me with a piece of paper on which she's written all the letters she knows and then proceeds to read me her recipe. She is not as independent as her older sister was, she likes me to be right next to her but she is definitely in charge. As I am able to influence quantities and make a few useful suggestions her cakes turn out pretty well on the whole. Sometimes we have to be inventive. With the above cake I realised part way through we hadn't put any butter in and that the cake was probably not going to be that great without it. So we grated it into the mix. It worked beautifully as did the crushed walnuts she decided to scatter through. 

A happy Lotta eating some of her mix

They also change and evolve through this process. Once she could read, Maya was happy to follow recipes because she could still make the cake by herself. She still likes to invent new flavour combinations and decorations but she's decided if she wants a tasty cake it's probably best to at least use a recipe for guidelines.  

A few tips for baking with kids

• If they're following their own recipe, let go of the expectation that the result will be beautiful or even tasty, it might be but there's no guarantee.
• The first rule of baking in our kitchen is push up your sleeves, wash your hands and find an apron.
• Using a stool to help your child be at the right height is a great help.
• If they're are inventing their recipe, it's useful to begin by discussing what kind of cake your child wants to make. I find this helps them think through their recipe and helps me suggest what order they might like to mix things in. (I can also sneak a look at a recipe to have an idea of quantities)
• In terms of quantities don't be too stingy unless you have very small baking pans. A small amount of mix in a too big tin makes for a very sad, flat little cake.
• Be prepared to be as involved or not as the child wants. In our experience with Maya, our being too involved took all the fun out of it for her to the point she would abandon her cake.
• If you're feeling especially organised, how about preparing an ingredients tray with everything they can use ready for them. You might want to put eggs, flour, milk, butter but also things like cocoa, chocolate or chocolate chips, banana (it helps with rising), baking powder and any other fun things you have to hand (cranberries, nuts, chocolate stars or hundreds and thousands).
• For a child who prefers to use a recipe there can still be choice. For example, Noah loves making apple cake, one thing he can change is the size of the apples, and whether they're in chunks or slices. It doesn't seem like much but it changes how they look a lot.
• Prepare yourself beforehand that even if they do help with the tidying up, you will probably end up doing a fair share of it. In our case, when they help with the washing up for example that usually means I end up having to clean the spillage all over the floor!        

* A handy tip from Tristan our science club leader. Pancake mix is great for experimentation because it doesn't need to rise. As long as you use egg as the base and some flour and some liquid, you are pretty much guaranteed the pancake will cook and be edible. How tasty is will be is variable however, some of the ones made with chickpea flour yesterday were not my favourites!

Five Little Things - Frost in the Garden

 

At the moment we wake up to a white world every other day. The days it's not frosty it's misty and it feels a bit like living in the middle of a fairy tale. I love the crisp, cleanness of frost how it highlights the skeletal structure of everything. 

I took these photos in my pajamas with a very thick sweater and a coat over the top, gloves, a scarf and a hat! Afterwards as I looked through them words began to flow and I found myself writing a short poem full of the details I'd seen. One thing led to another and I found myself contemplating how we too get frozen in life, frozen into habits or frozen in the sense of not being able to let go of things. All this fed into my writing and from the frost in the garden I moved onto loss and the things we cannot let ourselves lose, those things we carry with us wherever we go - loved ones who've passed, very special memories, the vague souvenir of a feeling...  

This is just one way the writing process can work for me, from image whether photographic or seen live through very specific detail and description and often only towards the end the emergence of the philosophical or emotional which is what probably made me react in the first place. It's like passing through a series of rooms and seeing what's in each one. And I realise more and more that this journey that I take through writing is also how I make sense of my experience of life and this is probably the most precious gift writing can give me, to better understand myself and my world. This year I plan to travel through these rooms often.

 

New Year, New Beginning

Just a few months ago, after a summer hiatus I committed myself to being regular about blogging again. And then, the cat got run over and ended up with a broken leg and surgery. An awful lot of taking her to and from vets appointments as well as adapting our home and lifestyle to her recovery. Just when it was all coming to an end, no more cage, no more confinement, no more pins through her leg ... my husband broke his ankle. And yes it all began again, surgery, hospital appointments, adaptation. He spent 8 weeks in plaster off his feet, 8 weeks where there was only one driver in our household oh and one person to cook, clean and wash clothes, build fires, haul logs... the list could go on and on. 

Cat recovery means a lot of sleep

The cast

On the positive side it's been a validating experience for me. Many of the things I've been doing are things I do a lot of anyway but some of them were definitely Frank's jobs before. Things like the log pile, a lot of the driving, the bins. And although it's been tiring it's also been great to see how much I can do and that we can adapt and function through difficult circumstances. 

The logs when they arrived - luckily Frank was still on two feet!

Perhaps the most important achievement personally was driving to and around the UK. Having only passed my test in March I was really nervous about the amount of driving involved and particularly the idea of driving on the left. My first reaction was to declare it was impossible and start looking at how to cancel our ferry plans and take a plane. I was very determined to spend Christmas with my family but really scared about the idea of driving. Well in the end taking flights was so complicated and expensive that we were faced with driving or staying home. Thanks to my husband's belief in my abilities and my determination to go we took the decision to drive and really it was fine. After years of thinking I might never drive, I am so pleased to have nailed this skill. It was also inspiring to see that with determination I can do things, even things I find difficult and frightening - something I really needed reminding of.

Definitely worth making the effort for - Christmas with family.

So we were forced to slow our lives down and do things differently and just like every other time this has happened to us, I can honestly say that while difficult at times, it's been a rewarding and enriching experience. Having only one driver meant we let some activities go for a while, and Frank's lack of mobility also meant I took my youngest with me a lot when normally she'd stay home. She loved our sculpture class and the class loved her. Luckily she is a cuddly kid so didn't mind everyone kissing and making a fuss of her. It really made us feel so welcome as a family and offered some much needed moral support. 

More time at home gave everyone a chance to rest and rediscover all the things they love doing together which has been great for family dynamics. Sadly slowing down didn't stop us all coming down with a very bad dose of the flu before the holidays. And while it was horrid at the time, the after effect of this illness and our recent experiences seems to be one of those developmental leaps that kids take sometimes x3. At the start of the year the children seem calmer and more able to co-exist and find solutions. We've begun having regular family meetings and even our smallest (4) is taking big steps, going to sleep on her own and playing by herself with a lot of imagination more and more. 

Winter in the Garden

All in all these hard times seem to have done us some good and it's a new year now and the cast is off! There are going to be a lot of physiotherapy appointments and sadly the cat still has a limp but really there so much to be grateful for. We're all ready to start this year enjoying the calmer activities that rhythm the last few months of winter and kicking off lots of new projects and new ideas. Here on the blog that will mean the return of twice weekly blog posts. One will focus more on writing and inspiration and the other on family and homeschooling. I hope you'll enjoy reading!