Cooking with Kids: Dandelion Cake

ETA: This was a previously-scheduled post that we forgot to delay in the midst of our shared national turmoil. By all means, if you need a bit of comfort and distraction, bake this cake. But at this time, we still think that finding your lane and taking action is important. xo

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If you haven’t introduced your kids to eating dandelions yet, this cake is a great place to start! And if YOU haven’t eaten dandelions yet, well then this will be a truly beautiful treat for everyone.

Start by sending the kids out to pick a bowl full of open dandelion flowers.

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Baking with Kids : Halloween Style

Cooking with Kids is an ongoing series where we share recipes that are easy enough to make with assistance from a two-year-old. If you’re new to the series, our first post provides detailed tips for cooking baking with little ones.

On Tuesday Sarah shared a Halloween appetizer. Yesterday I shared a well-wrapped main dish, and today we’re sharing the dessert that’s sure to make your little trick-or-treaters squirm giggle.

The focus of this Cooking with Kids post is all on the decorating, and in this post we give you sources for all of our fun supplies (including the spider cupcake holders!). Kids LOVE decorating treats, and Halloween is the perfect time to let them go wild. Make it spooky, creepy, silly, cute. It definitely doesn’t have to be perfect. And that’s what makes this project such a hit with big and little people.

liveseasoned spider cupcakes

I like to plan projects for us to do throughout the season, some more time and energy intensive than others. Decorating spider cupcakes purposefully falls on the easier side. It’s something that you could do on an afternoon when you want to add a little bit of Halloween excitement (and sugar!) to their day.

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Cooking with Kids : Brownies Hack!

Cooking with Kids is an ongoing series where we share recipes that are easy enough to make with a little kid.  If you’re new to the series, here’s our first post that provides our detailed tips for cooking with little ones; subsequent posts are less detailed, but each contains recipe-specific ideas for working with your little ones in the kitchen.

Ugg, our first Cooking with Kids post was exactly two years ago this month! Look at that wee little two-year-old Alex! I can hardly handle it. I’m also realizing that there have not been nearly enough of these posts, and we really have to get Luc in on the action.

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Putting my nostalgia aside, this post is definitely a hack in the whole Cooking with Kids series. We aren’t making anything from scratch and you may say that we’re barely cooking, BUT I think this simple cooking exercise has some serious independence value for impressionable kids.

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Bran Muffins

This recipe is not necessarily part of our Cooking with Kids series, but it could be! I include just a couple of ideas below. And if you are interested in getting your kiddos in the kitchen, this post has many of our tips and tricks.

There’s nothing like a good breakfast (and a strong cup of coffee) to get your week off to a great start. Do you agree? Somehow/somewhere a few months back, my breakfast routine completely vanished. I wasn’t interested in my spiffed-up bowls of oatmeal, eating cereal didn’t fill me up and tasted a bit too sugary (we all make bad choices in that aisle!), and I didn’t have the time or patience to scramble eggs. So I just didn’t eat, which is the worst plan when your mornings start with a bang and you’re running after two kids.

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It took me some time to identify the problem. Maybe I did a little of the five whys? Alex definitely does a whole lot of the 500 whys every day now. Anyway, I realized that I needed to find a healthy breakfast that I could pick up and go. I’m definitely not a fan of processed bars, and I don’t even like that a “grab-and-go” option is what my breakfast urges are calling for right now, but if it fills me up, it’s better than a hangry hangover.

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