Inside: This fun, easy cookie recipe can help kids can learn kitchen skills and gain confidence by independently making food they’ll love to eat. #creativekidsquest
The humble cookie. It seems so simple, and yet the cookie wields mysterious superpowers.
The cookie has its own monster. The cookie has its own beverage. The cookie has its own indispensable role on the internet. The cookie can even tell fortunes!
There’s just something about the unpretentious cookie that compels us to consume 2 billion of these little pastries a year.
Clearly, knowing how to make a decent cookie is a serious life skill every kid should know.
During these housebound days, forget math facts or reading practice. Instead, focus on truly useful life lessons, like how to bake cookies!
In this post:
Turn Cake Mix into Easy Cookies
Cake-mix cookies are a perfect starting point for kids to build their cookie-baking abilities.
Cake-mix cookies require just one bowl and four common ingredients. And they’re practically foolproof to make. The dough can be mixed up by hand or by electric hand-mixer, which my kids love to use. How can a motorized contraption AND beaters to lick ever be a bad thing?
And besides being easy, cake-mix cookies are soft, gooey, and oh so yummy!
Cake-mix cookies require only four ingredients:
- a cake mix
- a stick of butter
- 2 eggs
- 1 cup baking chips, chopped nuts, or sprinkles
My family likes this recipe for cake-mix cookies from the All Recipes website. There are hundreds of similar versions of this recipe around the internet, but we use this one for two reasons. First, this recipe uses butter instead of the vegetable oil many others call for. And second, this recipe has a video!
Raid Your Pantry
No doubt there’s a cake mix stockpiled somewhere in your pantry. Even sporadic cooks and pro bakers probably have one or two stashed in a cupboard somewhere.
Though I’m mostly a scratch baker, I do have a few recipes in my rotation that use cake mix. One of them is a favorite Christmas cookie, Red Velvet Candy Candy Cane Kiss Cookies. The only time I buy red velvet cake mix is for this recipe, and I had a spare in the cupboard left over from our holiday baking.
What kind of cake mix is squirreled away in your pantry? Go hunting with your kids and see what you turn up!
Mix and Match Flavors
Besides this cookie recipe being super easy to make, I love how you can mix and match flavor combinations based on what you have at hand. The cake mix can be paired with a variety of add-ins that you may also have in the pantry, such as baking chips, chopped nuts, and even sprinkles.
Yellow cake mix with butterscotch chips. Carrot cake mix with chopped walnuts. Double chocolate cookies concocted from chocolate cake and chocolate chips. Or the simple yet kid-pleasing combination of white cake mix with rainbow sprinkles.
For our cookies, the kids paired that red velvet cake mix with white chocolate chips. Aren’t they clever?
What flavor combination are your kids excited about?
Whip Up a Batch, Kid Style
My daughters, at ages eight and twelve, were able to make the cookies almost entirely without my assistance. The only part I helped with was rotating the hot cookie sheets half-way through the baking time and then removing them from the oven at the end. Otherwise, I left them to it while I worked nearby chopping veggies for dinner.
Younger children will need more assistance of course. But even if you make the cookies with them, involved in every step, this is still a baking experience in which kids can easily take ownership.
A small ice cream scoop is handy for dropping consistent amounts of dough onto the baking sheets. But if don’t have one, a tablespoon will do. We also used our silicone baking mats, which prevent sticking and make clean-up a breeze. Love these!
More Easy Recipes for Budding Chefs
Here are more dishes my kids like to make (mostly if not all) by themselves, with links to simple recipes for each. While not nearly as essential as cookie-making, knowledge of these sorts of basic recipes might also prove useful to kids’ long-term happiness and ability to feed themselves.
- Eggs in a Basket
- Mini pizzas
- Ranch dressing
- Fruit and yogurt smoothies
- Vegetable soup
- Fluffy Pancakes
- Fruit salad
- Deviled eggs
- Green salad and vinaigrette dressing
And lest you think it’s all red velvet and roses at my house, I’ll admit that there were highs and lows during the baking process. The big low consisted of a meltdown over who got to run the mixer first, which got heated enough to end up on the talking step.
Once that issue was resolved, the bakers soon moved on to giggles and corny jokes as they found their teamwork rhythm. Chalk another one up to that miraculous power of the cookie.
The kids were so proud of their glorious red cookies. And I was so proud of their strides towards mastering this vital life skill. If your kids don’t yet know their way around cookie baking, don’t you think it’s high time they learned?
This post is part of the Creative Kids Quest series.
The goal of Creative Kids Quest is to provide ideas and inspiration for fun and creative projects parents and kids can make together to banish boredom while housebound due to self-isolating, quarantine, or extreme weather. We hope you and your kid crew will join us! #creativekidsquest
Find links to the whole series below:
- Welcome to Creative Kids Quest: How to Be Creative with Kids While Stuck in the House
- Project #1: How to Help Kids Have a Focused Day When School’s Out
- Project #2: How to Make an Epic Paper Mural with Your Kids
- Project #3: Here are the Easy Cookies Kids Can Proudly Bake By Themselves