Baking with Babies

Let me set the scene. It's 7am and lashing rain after two days of sun. I was awake at 4am feeding Daithí, awake again at 5am when Shane left for work, and up at 6am with Fionn. He was hyper. I was not. I was in need of coffee.

Fionn starts asking to bake cupcakes, I don't even know where he learned this, I try not to bake as a rule, I leave that to my more talented friends, my contributions to gatherings tend to be savory; home-made salsa, guacamole, that sort of thing.  So I tell him no, but he persists. Against my better judgement, and probably out of fear of his screaming waking Daithí, who'd want to be fed AGAIN, I gave in.

Luckily while I was pregnant, I had stocked the press with everything Aldi have to offer for home baking. So I cracked out the old Junior Cert. Home Ec. cook book* and tried Chocolate Chip Cookies.

*This is the only cook book I use, as it assumes you have no idea what you're doing (check) and only have access to basic ingredients (I'm lazy, so check). It's made some surprisingly simple and delicious family dinners to be fair.

Note the little hands trying to get to the
chocolate while I was trying to take the pic!

This recipe is for two dozen cookies (The book said 12, but sure they'd be gone before Shane even got home from work so I doubled)

200g Butter
100g caster sugar
300g self-raising flour
100g chocolate-chips
2 tablespoon coco powder (This was a little tweak I made)

To make it easy for Fionn to get involved, I measured everything out into colourful Ikea bowls, and got him to turn on the oven. Of course he got excited and started working his way through the chocolate chips, so I had to quickly convince him to get the butter and sugar into the mixer. I creamed this for 2 minutes, while trying to line the baking trays and keep a hyper toddler away from chocolate.

He then 'helped' to pour the flour, coco and chocolate into the mix. He got it all over the table/ chair/ floor, got bored and went inside to watch Sarah and Duck.

So while that mixed for another 4 minutes 'till it looked like playdough, I cleaned up. He still had no interest in baking, so I rolled out the cookie dough, realised I had no cookie cutters, and improvised with an Ikea plastic cup. I seriously don't know how I survived before Ikea childrens' stuff.

Into the oven for 15mins at 180 and they were ready to come out. However, Daithí had woken up in this time, and was mid-feed, 15mins turned into 20mins, and as trying to explain to Fionn how to turn off the oven didn't work, they ended up a bit over done.

They were still pretty good if I do say so my self, Fionn didn't agree. He ate half of one, and came back into the kitchen to me cleaning up, pulled at the baking press again and said 'Bake cup-cakes Mamam'.

Seriously! I can't win.

Would love to hear if anyone tried out this recipe and how it went for you!