mirrormirror: Christmas Baking with Kids

Last Saturday the Minx and I attended a Christmas baking class for kids at our local PCC supermarket.

The class, run by Birgitte Antonson of Nature’s Way Food, was huge fun and perfectly judged for kids aged 4-6.

We were given the recipes for four Christmas treats – Pumpkin Seed Date Snowballs, Holiday Maple Spice Cookies, Yummy Yam Frosting and Jewel Cookies. Sneakily the recipes were comparatively healthy; minimising sugar, by cutting down the quantities and replacing it with maple syrup, honey, yams or fruit spreads; and incorporating more healthy ingreadients such as dried fruit, pumpkin seeds and whole wheat flour into the recipes. I have to say, for comparatively healthy stuff, it was utterly delicious and the Minx thought everything tasted suitably decadent and Christmassy.

Two of the cookies recipes had been pre-prepared by Birgitte, so we were handed our cookie dough and got to work rolling and cutting and generally making a mess.

Birgitte demonstrated how to make the Yam Frosting and the Pumpkin Seed Snowballs, and the kids were rapt, able to watch exactly what she was doing on the big screen.

Our favourites were the Jewel Cookies (recipe below), where the Minx got to roll them into balls, make a big thumbprint indentation and fill them with fruit spread.

When the Maple Spice cookies were baked we had lots of messy fun decorating them with yam frosting, shredded coconut for snow and naturally coloured sugar sprinkles (coloured with fruit juices etc). I had no idea these latter existed and will definitely be buying them again as the colours are very beautiful, notwithstanding the health benefits.