Making Cake with a Toddler

I said in a previous post I am not a baker or even an enthusiastic cook, but it appears my toddler is. Obviously, he inherited the baking gene from his father. A couple of days ago my son helped mix the ingredients for his own birthday cake and he did a great job. Today is his father’s birthday and he wanted to make the cake. I prepared all of the ingredients at the counter and he took it from there. He poured each ingredient into the mixing bowl saying each one out loud as he went along: “Water. Oil. Eggs. Mix, mix, mix.” He has baked so often with his father he knew how to turn on the mixer. When it was all done in true baker fashion he licked the mixing sticks (I am sure there is an official name for those things but I don’t know it) and the scraper (the little rubber tool to help frost) until all the chocolate was gone. Of course I put the cake mix into the pans and then into the oven to bake for 25 minutes. Once the cakes cooled we frosted each layer. Since his father loves chocolate we used not only chocolate cake mix, but chocolate frosting and topped it with crumbled German chocolate candy bar. To which again, in true baker fashion, my son sampled the broken and shredded chocolates to make sure they were of the right quality for his father’s cake.

This was a very fun activity to do with my son since I really did very little of the actual baking part. The fact that I did not overcook it is a testament to my son’s excellent baking skills since he checked the oven window frequently. I would definitely recommend this activity to other anti-baking mom’s and dad’s.