Kids Can Bake is a great book to introduce children to baking. Written and illustrated in the same style as Kids Can Cook and Plant, Sow, Make & Grow, which have helped us learn about basic cooking skills and gardening, it is full of delicious recipes for sweet and savoury baked treats.
Full of child friendly recipes it encompasses learning across several curriculum areas and its simple, child friendly layout makes it a perfect first cook book.
The book is divided into eight sections – Bread, Pizza and Savoury Snacks, Pies and Tarts, Cookies and other Sweet Treats, Cakes, Cupcakes and Muffins, Bars and Tray Bakes, Desserts and Cake Toppings.
A guide to what to do before you begin cooking and instructions on staying safe are followed by a pictorial list of kitchen equipment needed to make the recipes. All are clearly illustrated and labelled in a way that beginner readers can also follow.
The inclusion of basic baking instructions is really useful. They include how to line a cake tin, how to sift flour, how to separate an egg, how to rub in, how to see if a cake is cooked and how to knock back dough. We needed to do this when we made pretzels but I’d never heard the term before.
The recipes are easy to follow and beautifully illustrated. Ingredients are listed at the top and accompanied by step by step illustrations, this is fabulous for a child who is not yet a fluent reader, they can use the pictorial clues to help them find everything they need. The recipes are simple enough for an older child to follow independently with minimum intervention from an adult.
Bread recipes include cornbreads and soft pretzels which we definitely wanted to bake – they really were fabulously soft. There are also recipes for savoury snacks including pizzas and mini vegetable quiches. Sweet and savoury pies are included and we also baked scones. I have been trying to find a great scone recipe for several years and this is the best I’ve found so far 🙂
There are so many delicious cake, cupcake and muffin recipes including cupcakes, swiss roll, rainbow cake, devil’s food cake and marble cake. We tried the blueberry muffin recipe which was delicious!
Recipes for flapjacks, chocolate brownies, lemon drizzle cake and profiteroles are also included with a final section on cake toppings – buttercream, chocolate ganache and cream cheese frosting.
Kids Can Bake is truly inspiring and packed full of useful information and fascinating facts. Baking is a great activity to initiate learning in maths (counting, weighing and measuring), science (how food changes when it’s combined, heated or frozen) and literacy (following and writing instructions). And it’s always a treat to eat your own homemade food!
Age Range: 6 +
Author / Illustrator: Esther Coombs
Thank you to Button Books for sending us a copy of Kids Can Bake. It’s introduced us to several new recipes in a fun way.
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