“Can we make cakes today, mummy?”

I love when she asks this, and have rose tinted visions of how our little baking session will go (despite having enough experience by now to know that it never quite goes that way!). I find it really difficult to let go, and be child led, when it comes to making cakes. I don’t know if it’s the potential for mess (which usually doesn’t worry me), the food hygiene, or the fact that I believe that if you don’t adhere strictly to the recipe, the finished product won’t resemble anything like what we set out to create.

One thing I can loosen up a bit with is that old staple: rice crispie cakes. Which is handy, as they’re the only thing we bake together that my daughter will actually eat at the moment! They’re dead simple, and there’s very little that can go wrong.

I also love this because it’s almost like reverse baking, in that we use heat first, and leave the cakes to cool and set. My daughter gets to watch the chocolate melt (and this always fascinates her, and prompts her to liken it to other materials she knows have the same “melting” property – wax crayons, snow, candles etc). When it comes to the other ingredients (golden syrup and rice crispies), she gets to decide what feels right in terms of quantity, and loves mixing them together to create the right consistency for her cakes. She also insists on mini marshmallows, and adds these herself too. I really relish being able to step back and let her make her own decisions with these cakes. It’s really hard sometimes not to get too involved, particularly when it gets messy, but she is happier when I wait until she asks for help, or offers me a turn with the mixing spoon.

She’s learning maths (quantities, ratios, weighing, measuring, capacity, temperature, timings), science (properties of materials, effects of temperature, combining materials), physical skills (stirring liquids / solids of differing consistencies, coordination required to mix and hold the bowl, coordination to keep the mixture in the bowl, hand / eye coordination to fill the cake cases, awareness of positioning and balance on her stool), and interpersonal skills (turn taking, asking for help, following instructions in sequence). I’m learning to sit back and trust in her abilities.

I’m also learning that it doesn’t matter if the final product doesn’t turn out the way we’d hoped: the joy is in the journey, not the destination. The time spent working together, cooperating with an aim in mind is priceless. We can’t really go wrong with rice crispie cakes, but as and when we get a little more adventurous, I know we’ll learn more from our culinary disasters, than our seamless successes, and I would hope that we will be able to laugh them off, and relish the time spent together.