Baking Cookies Together

Today Ellie and I made cookies together for the first time. She is getting old enough to do more and more activities together, and I thought she might enjoy a little baking. With 6+ inches of fresh snow outside, we needed a nice indoor activity and I thought this might just be the thing. She was hooked from the moment I gave her an apron.

I thought ahead and pre-measured everything so that Ellie could dump the ingredients into the bowl on her own. And aside from her snitching a pinch or two of sugar here and there, it all went very well.

She had quite the technique to her ingredient dumping...

She was very patient while the batter mixed. I thought for sure she'd lose interest and want to go play, but she didn't. She just kept watching and saying things like, "Cookie!" and "Baking."

Soon it was time to put the cookie batter on the baking sheets, and she wanted to be a part of that, too! So every time I scooped some batter up, she'd grab the handle and say, "Squeeze!" and squeeze as hard as she could. Of course, she couldn't squeeze the batter out, but she didn't know that I was the one really doing the work. It seemed to make her very happy to have a job for this part of the cookie making process, too.

She also seemed to think that one of her jobs was to pick the craisins out of the cookies when she thought I wasn't looking and eat them. So I just gave miss sneaky her own pile of craisins to munch on so our cookies didn't have to go without.

All in all, it was a fun little adventure. She is definitely ready for this sort of activity, so I'm hoping to do more of them in the future! She was excited and engaged through the whole process, and she listened well when I told her what to do. It was fun to do together, and best of all we got to sit down and eat cookies together afterward. That's the best!