Our official first baking day for our 100 days of baking was a couple days ago. We were super eager to start once we got this idea into our heads and really wanted to make something special for Valentine’s Day. I was still working on setting up this lovely little site so I didn’t have the chance to post all of the excitement. Now I will!
After MUCH discussion (and I mean MUCH, these kids can talk and are about as good at making decisions as their mom…which is to say, not at all) we went with a classic red velvet cake and a new to us recipe for no churn ice cream.
Link for the cake recipe: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/red-velvet-cake-recipe
Back in the early days of baking with the kids I would pretty much do everything and they were just observers. They would get bored, complain, and generally suck all of the fun out of it…until I realized that I was the one sucking the fun out of it for them. I was afraid they would miss-measure and the recipe would be ruined (spoiler alert, it happened once and the process of making it made up for the disaster at the end). I was afraid they would make a huge mess (this also happens, but I make a huge mess too, so in the end who cares?). I was just generally afraid of loosing control of what was happening, but I’ve found along the way that including the kids in every step of the recipe keeps them engaged and having fun, versus picking and choosing where I think they should be helping.
For this cake kids did the measuring. They’ve been working on accurate measurements scooping the dry ingredients and then using the back of a butter knife to level it off. If this isn’t a trick you use, you should. It will ensure a more even measure and a better finished product. The 8 year old loves to read the recipe and help when the 5 year old needs it. I’m there to help with questions and crack eggs (neither of them like to do it, but neither do I, so get to it kids!) and enjoy watching them work together.
Once we finished the cake we needed to make the frosting. I know included in the recipe is a traditional buttercream but we decided to kick it up and make a cream cheese frosting for this beauty.
Link to the frosting recipe: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/cream-cheese-frosting-recipe
Once I leveled (this just means I cut off the top of the cake to make it more even and easier to stack for those of you shaking your head and thinking I’m constructing something far more difficult then I am) the cakes using a sharp knife the kids pretty much took over. They frosted (which was by no means perfect. So many cake crumbs got pulled into the middle layer as the overspread it and mushed it around…but guess what, you can’t even see that!), added the sprinkles (far more then I would’ve, but I wasn’t in charge), and stacked that beauty! In the end, while it wasn’t perfect, it was perfectly created by 2 kids who had a blast and weren’t fighting for over an hour! I’m calling it a win!
Want to see how our ice cream turned out? Visit our Facebook page! 100 days of baking with kids. You can also see the results after we dug in to these treats.
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100 days of baking with kids 