Baking With Jack

Jack loves to cook.  He spends a lot of time “cooking” while playing with his kitchen.  He enjoys making hamburgers, and pancakes and corn.  He stirs and flips and stirs some more.  While he enjoys pretend cooking, there is no substitute for the real thing.  He asks almost every night to help me with dinner.  I let him help when I can (and safe for him to do so), but sometimes he needs a project where he can do most of the work.

Baking with Jack is perfect because he can do most of the work and it’s generally a pretty short project.  He doesn’t usually care about eating what we make so I don’t have to deal with him bugging me while our project is in the oven.

I saw this idea on Pinterest but apparently didn’t pin it, so I can’t give proper credit, but basically it’s a pumpkin cake.  Ingredients are a boxed cake mix and a can of pumpkin. That’s it.  When I saw this, I knew it was perfect for Jack. (I did make some homemade cream cheese icing using cream cheese, powdered sugar, butter and vanilla).

Jack let me open the cake mix with my safety scissors, as he calls them, but then he was in charge of dumping the mix into the bowl.

I added the pumpkin and worked the mixer but Jack gave everything a good stir afterwards.

After that comes the best part. Licking the beaters.

Let Mommy put the cake in a pan and toss it in the over for 40ish minutes

Next it’s time to clean up.  I highly recommend putting your toddler to work by having them do the dishes. He actually does a good job. It just takes him a long time.  And now he has a fit if I don’t let him wash the dishes.  I’m thinking of renting him out.  Or at a minimum putting him to work after Thanksgiving dinner.

This is where a picture of the finished product should be, but I didn’t take one so just imagine a yummy pumpkin cake with cream cheese icing.

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