Babycakes

One thing I’ve learned raising all my children, helping with their classes and scout troops and playing with my grandchildren is not to have unreal expectations when I start a project with them.  I didn’t get this when I was younger, but it doesn’t take long when working with kids to figure it out.

The Babycakes package and the cute pink machine drew me in.  This looked like a fun project to do with my grandkids, especially the girls.  My older granddaughter could get really creative and it looked simple enough to do with my 3 year old.  I’ve always preferred real cooking to pretend and I think little dishes or bits of food are adorable.  Today, I had the opportunity to try it out with Eliza.  Remember, don’t have unreal expectations.

We started with a Jiffy cake mix.  It’s the right size and easy.  She used my Miracle Whisk and beat it herself.  Okay, I helped a little at the end to get it all mixed.  She learned the word batter.

I thought it was going to be a little tricky to get the batter into the cupcake cups…and it was.  Not as bad as I thought.  She did about as well as I did, but her attention span is very short.  We got the first 8 cupcakes into the Babycakes oven.

It works great!  In about 6-8 minutes, they’re done & you are ready to decorate.  For this time, we used canned frosting.  I wasn’t sure how patient my co-chef was going to be.  She got the hang of it pretty quickly, especially the licking the spreader part.  I had to put the big blob on the cake finally and she did a nice job of spreading.  And tasting.

Decorating with the sprinkles I got was a little harder than I imagined.  For one thing, they didn’t come out very easily and she tended to stick the container right into the icing.  She got better and liked all the choices.  We had blue, brown, multi-colored, and red, white and blue.  After the first batch, she treated herself to a cake and milk.  She did the same thing after the second batch.

The mix made 24 cakes.  I was doing a little more each time, although she continued to help.  She picked out one with brown sprinkles to take home to leave out for Santa.  The rest will be for her cousins, she said.  Her Christmas gifts to them.

When we finished, I found her reading the manual.  She said she need to read her ‘structions.  That’s good.  She read them out loud for a bit and there must be a lot of one, two, three that is involved in the process.

So that’s the story of Babycakes.  I love it and just know we are going to take this new activity to very creative high levels around here.  We haven’t even gotten to pies yet.