The bakerman

I am fortunate in that my lils have always loved to cook with me. Sure, it makes for messier meal prep, and it might take twice as long to get some recipes made, but it has allowed me to get the recipes made, which is the important part. Food is important to me! I have encouraged their help from an early age. I started with really simple stuff, like moving ingredients around the kitchen and playing with the measuring spoons, but over time both lils have come to be able to do pretty much anything that I ask of them in the kitchen. They listen, because they know the only rule about cooking with mom – if you don’t listen, you have to leave. Being kicked out of the kitchen is the worst thing that a mama could do to her lils, so they listen.

Woo has always been our adventurous foodie. He has eaten everything we put in front of him (which included peanut butter that one time. OOPS), and rarely fusses about the content of his meals. He tries new, exotic foods on a regular basis, and eats with gusto when he finds something he likes. His play has often included a creative cooking session, where he dreams up recipes that he likes us to make. Some of them are just crazy, but some of them sound pretty good. I have taken him up on the suggestions as to what he would like to see added to a dish on occasion, and am often surprised please with the result.

In the last year, he has started to really experiment in the kitchen. Some of his creations are downright awful (hello apple milkshakes!), but some seem to be quite tasty, according to both Woo and Goose. Last weekend he decided to make some cupcakes without a recipe. He determined what ingredients he would need, measured the quantities, and set them in the oven and watched them like a baby, before icing them with nutella.

They looked like cupcakes, smelled like cupcakes and felt like cupcakes… In the end they would have been good had he not added too much salt. Way too much salt. So much salt that the critters who broke into our green bin the following night licked the icing off, but refused to eat the cake (or died trying). We stressed that it was a great first effort, but he was a little embarrassed, and knew that they weren’t good. I was still impressed, as I was well into adulthood before I was brave enough to create a baked good with no recipe to base it on.

This weekend found Woo reading through one of his cookbooks, when he happened upon a vanilla cupcake recipe. He wanted to make it, so we encouraged him and made him responsible for it all. He had a small bit of help, but the end result was a vanilla cupcake, complete with strawberry icing.