Improvisational Cooking With Kids

Our last library trip yielded, among other things, a cooking-with-kids recipe book. The recipes in it are simple, very well illustrated, and generally campy so as to appeal to children. Today we settled on the least campy one.

The kiddos and I set about making the recipe. Star cracked eggs. Dandelion switched the mixer on and off. It was fun. But not nearly as much fun as it was when I decided to change the recipe.

One brick of cream cheese and some cinnamon/sugar were the only add-ins we needed. The cheese chunks that they are so merrily sugar-coating are twelfths of a regular brick of cream cheese (because the recipe make 12 cupcakes). Here are the girls, obviously delighted to coat chunks of cream cheese in cinnamon 'n sugar. They were excellent kitchen helpers.

I took the coated lumps of cream cheese and plopped them on top of the batter, already in each (well greased because who knew we were out of cupcake papers?) cupcake well. Then I took all the left over cinnamon and sugar and parceled it out over each mess of sugar-coated cheese 'n batter. This is how they looked like when they went into the oven.

And this is how they looked about 20 minutes later.



The girls were very pleased . . . with themselves and the cupcakes.