Cooking with Kids Review

Reviewed by Juliana Headley

Autumn is my favourite time of the year! Especially the onset of it! The weather is still amazingly warm, the sun is shining and the colours around us are out of this world! Since being a small girl I have been fascinated by almost an overnight change in the nature. One minute everything is green, the next minute there is an abundance of bold colours  – golden fields, red, yellow and brown woods, occasional green lawn.

Autumn is also a wonderful time of harvest. Besides different vegetables and fruit, there is an abundance of natural craft material – acorns, conkers, pinecones – ideal to keep children busy. In our house, usually, we tend to create stuff with kids and then there is a bit of a battle: it’s a shame to throw it away, at the same time our storage has its limits.

This time we decided it would be fun to have a craft session with a twist – at the end we can eat everything we’ve made. Inspired by the autumn theme, we stopped at our local Aldi supermarket for some ingredients (I like shopping at Aldi, as the quality of the products is on par with leading supermarkets chains, the price however is a lot cheaper. Kids love that too, with the savings we all can have a little treat for the whole family).

At home, stocked with all the freshly bought ingredients, we made simple dough and had tons of fun mixing different colours. All the colours turned out perfect for our autumn theme.

It’s great to get children involved in the kitchen from early ages. They learn a lot of maths without realising it and in a fun way – measurements, fractions, volumes – all of that will come in handy once they start learn all of that at school. Also this dough keeps well in the fridge for a couple of days, if recipe quantities increased, the left overs can be stored for another day as long as it’s kept refrigerated. Great idea for the upcoming October school holidays.

Tip: Food colourings are designed for icing and when heated in the oven do not keep their colour.

Recipe

Ingredients:

• 3 cups of self-rising flour
• 200g of unsalted butter
• 1 pinch of salt
• 1 egg
• 1 cup of sugar

1. Keep the butter at room temperature for 1 hour before using.

2. Cut butter into small pieces and then beat with sugar and egg in a large bowl.

3. Add flour and salt and mix well.

4. Roll the dough and cut into desired shapes.

5. Put the shapes onto lined baking trays and leave to chill for 20 min in the fridge.

6. Pre-heat oven to 180-200C and bake for 15 min until golden brown.

We had great fun in the kitchen and was a relatively inexpensive way to entertain the kids and spend some quality time with them.

Aldi offer a good range of ingredients and cooking utilities at prices that won’t break the bank, so why not pop down to your nearest Aldi store and take a look and get the kids helping out in the kitchen!