Bake Banana Bread with Toddlers

Tuesday night, Jenny abruptly decided to bake banana bread. Such decisions aren’t unusual around here; most of our cooking is on a whim. However, in this case she also wanted to include the boys. As I wasn’t aware of this until it started happening, my contribution was limited to recipe location and filming. I nailed the first part.

Rachel and I talked about cooking with kids during our Muffins from the Darkest Timeline episode of Tangential Parenting. One of the keys to success is letting kids have their own set of tools. This also means that it needs to be the right size. We found some mini spoons and spatulas at a local kitchen store, but we’ve also found items online that we’ve tagged for the future:

Durability is key, especially for the under 5 crowd. If they are made of cheap plastic, it’s entirely possible for the tool to break during use. That can be trouble for two reasons: You’ll have an upset kid, and your meal is now contaminated with shards of plastic. Also, don’t try to use things that are made for play kitchens. While they might be safe in terms of chemicals, they probably won’t stand up to the rigors of mixing a batter. It’s also possible the toy could be attacked by acids or other things in the food, leaving a bad taste, a broken toy, or worse.

What to cook?

We used a cookbook off our shelf for the banana bread. Alton Brown’s recipes are often clearly written and broken down into steps that are easily worked by a novice cook. In our case, we used his book, which focuses on baking and baking techniques. It also has a banana bread recipe that has served us well in the past.

Besides that, it has ingredient weights in addition to volume (1 cup, 2 tablespoons, etc.) I prefer this for two reasons. You use fewer dishes, as you can toss the bowl on the scale, tare (set to zero), add an ingredient, tare again, add next ingredient, etc. You don’t dirty a half dozen bowls and dishes to hold measured ingredients, have to have multiple measuring cups on hand, and everything else. The other reason, which is very important in baking, is accuracy. The oft-cited example is flour. Depending on how packed your bag of flour is and how you fill the measuring cup, you could end up with anywhere between four and six ounces in a cup of flour. That’s a huge difference, and one that could ruin a loaf of bread.

Of course, that is not the method employed in our video. Nevertheless, we do own both a , and a smaller, for ingredients where high precision is needed.

Wrapping up

It was a fun experience. When Jenny watched the video later, she commented that it wasn’t nearly as stressful as it looks like it should have been. It’s certainly important to teach the kids how to cook and bake, as it makes for functioning adults. If we can turn them into our little sous chefs to make meal preparation easier in the future, that will be a bonus as well. In the meantime, we’ll probably keep to mixing, stirring, and simple tasks like that.