The Kids in my Kitchen: Gingerbread!

This morning Makenna flipped through her cookbook that she got as a Christmas Present from Gran last year, and jumped (literally!) at the idea of making "Gingerbread Kids"

Makenna found all the ingredients we needed and then she and Jack pulled their chairs up to the island to learn how to make gingerbread.

This is a typical weekend Makenna outfit, yes.

First, combine the butter and brown sugar. Recipe is below.

Then, Mommy used the beaters to make the butter and sugar "light and fluffy"...apparently the beaters are loud.

Add 1 egg

And Molasses. Makenna had never heard of "Moe-lasses" and once she saw how dark and sticky it was, thought Jack should be the one to deal with it.



Use the beaters again to mix well.

Next, in a seperate bowl, combine flour, baking soda, ginger, cinnamon, salt and ground cloves.

At this point I wondered if the whole experiment would de-rail, as Makenna is usually quite vocal in how much she dislikes cinnamon and always refuses to eat anything if she knows it has cinnamon in it. I even questioned her as we were adding it today and she said "Oh, it's fine!"

Stir all of the dry ingredients.

Add 1/2 of the dry ingredients to the molasses mixture and mix well.

Then add the remaining 1/2 of dry ingredients and mix until you can't see any more "white".

Mommy ended up taking over the stirring as the dough got too heavy for the kids to stir.

Then sprinkle flour onto your work surface so you will be able to roll the dough without is sticking to everything. Makenna thought this was pretty cool to spread flour all over the island. On purpose.

Just like rolling playdough, roll out the cookie dough to desired thickness.

Cut out shapes with cookie cutters! I was wishing I had Halloween cookie cutters, but we don't. Then I suggested we do all "people" cookies and decorate them all in different outfits (think edible paper dolls!), but Makenna wanted a mix of different shapes.

Between the two of them, they got 14 different cookies. Hearts, Stars, Apples, Leaves, People, a Teddy Bear and an Angel.

While they were baking (350 Degrees F for 8 mins), Makenna's job was to put away the ingredients, and my job was to clean up this:

We decorated them right after lunch. The cookbook recommends using peanut butter or Nutella as the "glue", but neither of my kids like Peanut Butter and I do not buy Nutella so we went right for the Chocolate Icing.

Jack's Teddy Bear. With the arms already bitten off.

Makenna working on her heart. Full of unhealthy things. Oh, did I mention this week's blog post would NOT be about healthy cooking with my kids?!

Mmmmmmm.....

Very straight forward, painless, and they had lots of fun.

I tried, but couldn't legibly get Makenna's full name on a cookie

As I was taking all the pictures, Makenna said "you ARE putting these on Facebook right????

Hee hee.


Recipe for "Gingerbread Kids" from Company's Coming Kids Do Baking Cookbook, Page 67.

1/2 cup Butter, softened

1/4 cup packed brown sugar

1 lg egg

1/4 cup Fancy (mild) Molasses

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour. (Recipe calls for 1 1/4 cups white flour, and 1/4 cup whole wheat flour, but i don't have whole wheat flour, so i just used all white flour).

1/2 tsp Baking Soda

1/2 tsp ground ginger

1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp salt

1/8 tsp ground cloves

**I will say, I did find this recipe kind of "bland" tasting, but then, maybe that's why kids like it...because it's not very spicy...ginger-y, or "cinnamon-ey". They sure liked it.

:)