kids in the kitchen

Because I'm a bit of a know it all mother who thinks children should be able to cook and function semi independently by the time they turn 18, I often encourage the kids to join in with the cooking and baking that I do.  Yesterday however, I took the plunge and left them to their own devices.  Yep, they were completely unsupervised and free to whip up whatever they wanted.  

They decided they wanted to bake something and used this awesome cookbook that my very clever cousin designed and made....

Here are the kids in action, making the world's easiest (and yummiest) chocolate cake....

They did a great job, although in all their excitement of baking on their own, they totally forgot to add the baking powder which resulted in a very flat cake and a very important baking lesson (baked goods won't rise without good old baking powder!)

Then, last night, they asked if they could make something else.  So they threw a batch of  together these delicious Cream Puffs...

Now I'm not going to lie,  I did help them a little bit with making these little morsels as boiling water and hardcore stirring was involved.  But they did a fair bit of it themselves and even cleaned up afterwards. Winning!

Here's what you'll need to do to make your own Never Fail Cream Puffs...

Melt:

2 tablespoons butter in cup of water

When boiling add:

1 cup flour and 1 teaspoon baking powder (sifted)

Mix quickly.

Remove from head and add 4 unbeaten eggs, one at a time.

Beat until smooth and place in spoonfuls on a cold greased tray.

Bake for 30 minutes.

Let the cream puffs cool before filling them with cream (I sweetened mine with 2 tablespoons of icing sugar) and icing with chocolate icing (1 cup icing sugar, 2 tablespoons cocoa, 2 tablespoons water)

Thanks Emma, and Nana M, the cookbook and it's recipes are amazeballs.

How about you?  Do you have a clever relative that totally has inherited all of the creative genes?  Or is that just me?