After 35 years of baking everywhere and anyway I can with anyone 2 to 92 who’d join me, I love to find new ideas, recipes and resources to get the flour in the bowl and the heart and mind engaged. It takes more than a cool app or web-site to get a baking buzz going in today’s kitchens. There are at least three challenges to overcome:
- Skill comfort to bake alone OR an available baking assistant
- Available ingredients and tools
- Time (inversely related to skill—the more baking skill, the less time you’ll need)
HomeBaking.org is ALWAYS a great place to start, so let me introduce our newest Writer’s Guild member, Deanna F. Cook. Deanna is a kids-cooking best-selling author, content director at Kidstir, as well as an acquisitions editor at Storey Publishing. She lives in western Massachusetts and is found online at deannafcook.com.
Her newest book, Baking Class, 2017, Storey Publishing, ISBN 978-1-61212-855-9, is perfect for building baking skills, baking for the family, and giving to someone you love.
You can’t replace baking together as a gift that nourishes the whole person for a lifetime. Contributing something you’ve baked for a meal or event builds self-sufficiency and true self-esteem. Deanna’s “baking companion” works great for kids ages 6–12 and features 50 easy-to-follow recipes.
Deanna shares, “I invited more than 20 children over to my kitchen and we baked together and photographed the steps along the way. All the recipes are easy to follow, fun to look at, and can be made by kids with just a little help from a grown-up. “
Step-by-step photos teach bakers-in-training how to knead dough, make biscuits, popovers, decorate cookies, and make a perfect pie, along with essential skills like measuring flour and decorating a cake—perfect for meals or made-by-me-for-you gift giving!
You’ll start a new holiday meal “must-have” with Puffy Popovers, Just 5 ingredients—2 tablespoons butter, 2 eggs, 1cup milk, 1 cup all-purpose flour, and ½ teaspoon salt, a muffin cup pan and an oven! Popovers are “a science experiment you can eat” and MUST be locally made—yet another plus.
Teachers, get the total buy-in of students and parents by hosting an early childhood baking workshop using the Baking Class resources.
When you wrap a book to give, why not include a “time certificate,” for a date and place to bake some recipes side-by-side in 2018? It’s the gift that keeps on giving.