I love cooking but I’m not nearly as keen on baking or making sweet stuff.  I guess I’m just more of a savoury person.  Anya though loves baking and so lately I’ve been thinking that I need to do a bit more with her.  A couple of weekends ago she and I made some bunny cookies and she loved getting involved.  The look of pure excitement on her face when I told her we were going to be making cookies together made me think I need to do this more often.  It also made me realise that it doesn’t have to be a complicated exercise, in fact the simpler the better.  Sometimes it can even be about decorating some shop bought cakes or cookies.  Or making simple fairy cakes and just decorating the cupcake liners.  So with half-term coming up I thought it would be handy to have a few easy baking ideas up my sleeve:

1. Making cookies in different shapes like we did a few weeks ago is always fun.  I found a very simple cookie recipe and showed Anya all the cookie cutter shapes we have and she chose to make bunnies.  I didn’t have time to make icing so instead we made little tails from the same cookie dough.  She had great fun cutting out the shapes and getting flour all over herself.  Next time we might try cloud, star and moon shaped ones.

2.  This is such a cute idea!  Make simple shapes with filo pastry and then bake the pastry.  In this filo boat recipe they’ve also made a chocolate pool (yum!) but if you didn’t want to do that, you could just fill the boats with chopped red berries and dust with icing sugar.  Or for an extra sweet treat, fill will little M&M’s.   This is top of my list to try soon. 

3.  Make simple cupcakes or buy them and have fun decorating them.  I especially like the idea of making little paper decorations to adorn the cupcake liners and to top them rather than using sprinkles and icing.  Just like these mustache cupcakes, they’ll look so much more unique and you can be as creative as you like.

4.  Baking doesn’t always have to mean sweet things.  Like these teddy bear rolls, making bread can be just as much fun.  Kids love playing with dough of any sort so why not try making fun shaped bread.  You can make any shape you like and then give it ears, a tail or anything else that your kids can imagine.