It is Christmas time and that means cookie baking around this house. We bake lots and lots of goodies during the holidays and it is a family affair. It is one of my favorite ways to homeschool around the holidays. Baking and gift making are great ways to teach art concepts and life skills. But they can also create a huge mess all over the house. Here are 3 ways I have found to make cookie decorating easier and cleaner even with little ones helping.
1. Pans with sides – This helps to catch the extra sprinkles and to keep the cookies a little safer from elbows smashing them. It is much easier to carry a pan from the table to the oven without leaving a trail of sprinkles if there are sides to contain the loose ones that cover the bottom of the pan.
2. Muffin Tins – Yes, I know that we are making cookies and not muffins but somewhere along the line someone thought it was okay to not put shaker tops on all sprinkles. Kinda like salad dressing! We are a salad loving family and I will never understand why they stopped putting squeeze tops on dressing! Why oh why would they do that! Don’t they know that sometimes, in some families, children eat salad! Okay, sorry rant over. Back to sprinkles! I use my little mini muffin tins to keep sprinkles divided but also to control the amount that little ones have access too. As you know on this homeschool blog, I love to allow my children to learn early and I firmly believe that when taught the proper way to do something children can be much more independent than normally allowed.
3. Newspaper – Most of the time we only think to cover a child’s work area when they are painting or something. But I have found that it also makes clean up from cookie decorating so much easier!!! Not to mention that it protects your table or counter from scratches as sprinkles are spilled and pans are moved and turned. Cookie decorating can be hard on a kitchen.
With these three easy steps cookie decorating can be a relaxing, memory making time with your children and not something that causes you to have an anxiety attack at the mention of its approaching.
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