[AD] Maple Kitchen Adventures Making Blueberry & Strawberry Muffins

We love to cook as a family. My eight-year-old twins also love to get involved, whether it’s preparing a family meal or baking cakes and muffins.

So when the opportunity came along to team up with Maple Canada UK it was a perfect chance to get in the kitchen as a family and start baking.

Who is Maple from Canada UK?

Maple from Canada UK represents maple syrup producers from Canada, including 11,300 from Quebec  and supports the international export of Canadian maple syrup all over the world.

How is maple made?

It’s really important to know where the food comes from that you are eating. Maple syrup simply just needs time and lots of trees. In fact, there are 34 million trees in full syrupy working order which are found deep in the Canadian forests where the weather is perfect for the sugary sap to be harvested from maple trees.

As the winter weather takes hold, the sap thins and can be harvested. Most of the maple forests can be found in Quebec, the world’s biggest producer of maple syrup. Maple syrup comes in four grades: golden, amber, dark and very dark. It takes about 40 litres of sap to make just 1 litre of pure Canadian maple syrup.

As I have already said, my 8-year -old twin girls love to get involved when it comes to cooking and they are very curious about different types of food. They will often ask where does this type or that type of food come from. As a family, we are great believers in letting our girls get involved in preparing and cooking meals, as this will be a wonderful skill that they can take through their lives and also hopefully make them more likely to try different types of food, in turn this will give them a healthy and well balanced diet.

Maple from Canada UK has home-schooling workbooks which are aimed at different age groups. They contain activities, recipes and educational information all about Canadian maple syrup. They also include all the benefits of maple syrup such as its wonderful taste, amazing versatility when cooking, and that it’s a natural source of energy..

The workbooks are free to download. Click here to check them out! The mission of Maple from Canada UK is to get children of all ages to become curious about food and cooking. Another aim of the workbooks is to teach children to follow the recipe instructions and use their mathematical skills with measuring and to be organised which are all fantastic life skills.

I looked at the age-specific workbook with my 8-year-old twin girls and let them decide what they would like to make. They immediately saw the Maple and Blueberry muffins and their faces lit up. The only problem was one of them is not fussed on blueberries so I said we could make two batches. One with blueberries and the other with strawberries. What I particularly like about this recipe is that the girls would be able to do this mostly on their own with just us supervising and of course being in charge of the oven.

The recipe for Maple Muffins was really easy for the girls to follow on their own and they quickly set about mixing the ingredients.

They beat the butter into a smooth paste and added the maple syrup. The maple used for this recipe was the golden maple syrup because of its delicate taste. They added the eggs mixing them all together, they mixed in the chia seeds and natural yogurt.

In a separate a bowl they blended the flour, bicarbonate of soda and baking powder, not forgetting the salt. They then mixed this with the wet ingredients and finally folded in the blueberries and strawberries. All that was left to do was to put their muffin mixture into the cases and pop them in the oven to cook.

The muffins took about 30 minutes to cook. The girls couldn’t wait for them to be cooked so they could try them.

This recipe was in my opinion absolutely perfect for the girls because they were able to do everything themselves and the satisfaction for them that they had prepared everything by themselves was there to see on their little faces.

Once the muffins had cooled, we couldn’t wait to try them out and I have to admit they were delicious. Adding maple syrup definitely gave them a very unique taste, which made them very yummy.

In all the workbooks there are extra activities and one of my girls particularly enjoyed doing the activity where you had to work out where in the world the ingredients came from by identifying on a map which country they originate from.

We as a family have lots of kitchen adventures cooking and baking. By using the Maple from Canada UK free downloadable workbooks my twin girls are definitely more curious about food and absolutely loved doing all the work themselves. They can’t wait to for their next kitchen adventure The Maple Way.

Do your children like cooking? Have you tried the workbooks from Maple from Canada UK? I would love to hear in the comments below.

This is a paid collaboration with Maple from Canada UK.