Monkey loves baking, he would do it every day if he could and I do love doing it with him but I don’t have the energy to do it with as much at the moment. Last weekend as we were having a bit of a quiet weekend I thought it was a good opportunity to try and do some with him. With 2 parents it meant one could bake with him while the other could look after LM.
Hubs loves baking, he was the one who got me interested in baking when we met and he really loves baking with Monkey. He has more patience than I do too so they are a great little team. So it was an easy decision for them to spend some time together and do some baking! one of Monkey’s favourite programmes at the moment is Bing Bunny and there is an episode where they make Ginger Bunny biscuits. He loves it so I wanted to find a recipe where you can roll it out and cut out shapes as most of our biscuit recipes are for just free-formed biscuits really. Neither hubs or I like gingerbread very much though so we though either a plain or chocolatey one would be great.
So I found this lovely, simple, recipe to make lovely simple chocolate biscuits.
225g Self raising Flour
100g Caster Sugar
3 tbsp cocoa powder
100g Margarine
5 tbsp Milk
A few drops of vanilla essence.
Pre-heat the oven to 190°C and grease 2 baking trays.
Mix the flour, sugar and cocoa in a bowel and rub in the margarine.
Add the milk and vanilla essence and mix in well. Bring together with your hands and knead lightly on a floured service. (Ours still felt really gooey at this point but soon firmed up with some kneading in the flour).
Roll out to a thickness of 0.5cm and cut shapes. The recipe we used 7.5cm rounds and baked the biscuits for 8 – 10 minutes. We gave Monkey the choice out of all of our cutters and ended up with Star and Rhombus biscuits and only baked ours for 7 minutes which was perfect.
Monkey is so good at baking now – a far cry from the early days where all he wanted was to eat the raw ingredients, even the flour, now he is so good at measuring everything out and so careful with it all, and only ate some of the dough when we said it was ok to.
He was less keen on getting his hands really mucky when mixing the dough, but loved kneading it and helping daddy roll it out (he hasn’t got the hang of rolling it out himself yet).
Then of course was the important job of cutting out the shapes ready to bake!
You can decorate these biscuits however you like, the recipe used a Chocolate Glace Icing but we used some little icing tubes we already had in the cupboard and again I was pleased to see how precise he was. Even since the baking we did at Christmas he has got a lot more precise and was great at putting dots and patterns on the biscuits.
The finished biscuits! Obviously Daddy helped with some of the patterns but Monkey did a lot of them by himself.
These chocolate biscuits are super quick and simple to make although obviously baking them with a toddler takes a little longer but just adds to the fun. Monkey adored making these with daddy and actually they were really, really tasty!
The most important part is definitely eating and decorating.
Lizzie Dripping
Baking biscuits is so much fun. I don’t particularly care for chocolate biscuits but I used to love baking plain biscuits. I also loved decorating them with M&M’s )which does add some chocolatey taste) or glazing.
These look yummy! #toddlerapprovedtuesday
These look very yummy and sounds like a fairly simple recipe to follow too. Monkey looks like he is enjoying himself – love the photo of him putting the shapes on the tray. My eldest loves that episode of Bing Bunny too – think we will have to try making these biscuits ourselves 🙂
These look so cute and little man did a good job decorating them #TastyTuesday
Definitely need to pin this I bet my terror would love to have a go at these (not that he deserves it today!!!)
These look yummy! I try to bake with Lamb but he’s still a bit young and tends to lose interest half way through! I end up baking alone! x #toddlerapprovedtuesday
Awww looks so fun to do and the finish product looks yum! #letkidsbekids
They do look very tasty #letkidsbekids
These look fab. We managed a spot of baking last week too. We’ll have to try your recipe as Little Miss loves chocolate biscuits and I love the fact that it seems so quick and easy and also doesn’t have egg in so hopefully just a teeny bit less messy! I know it doesn’t matter really but Little Miss tries to copy everything and cracking eggs is one thing I could do without her attempting right now! #LetKidsBeKids
Look at him go with that decorating! #Letkidsbekids
Baking is good fun and a lovely activity for father son time. Ive never made chocolate biscuits before, but these look lovely. It looks like Monkey is enjoying himself.
Thanks for linking #LetKidsBeKids
Baking is such a fun activity, we do a fair bit of it 🙂 It’s lovely to see them get better at it, the wee girl can crack eggs now! Those biscuits look lovely, decorating is always the favourite bit here xx #MiniCreations
This look so yummy! #MiniCreations
Love these Daddy and son baking shots, yummy biscuits too! Thanks for linking up to #tastytuesdays
Mmm they look yummy!! Well done Monkey you did good 🙂
Lovely looking biscuits and nice to see Daddy hard at work in the kitchen too!
Thanks for your support again #toddlerapprovedtuesday xx
Lucas says – As always Monkey, you have amazed me with your awesomeness. The biscuuits look really yummy. I hope you saved me one! Thanks for linking to #minicreations
YUMMY! YUMMY! YUMMY!
We love baking it is definitely number one choice in this house!
Thanks for linking up to #ToddlerApprovedTuesday (and sorry I’m late in commenting, last week was mad with half term and a trip away!)
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It really looks like they had fun together. I love how much he’s concentrating. Potato still tries to eat all the raw ingredients, including the flour! Monkey did a great job with the decorating too. Very neat!
Thanks for linking up with #LittleChefs