Baking: It’s Not Just For Girls

Though most cake packets in the supermarket seem to come with brightly coloured icing and sugar butterflies, baking is most certainly not just for girls. Boys can and should get baking too and learning to cook for themselves is a life skill that everyone should acquire.

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For many parents, opposing gender stereotypes can be difficult.On the one hand, you want your kids to grow up to be confident and able to pursue any career path they want, but you also want to avoid them being deemed socially weird and losing friendships as a result.

The solution, or maybe just one of the solutions, is to simply present them with lots of options – toys, subjects, books, fancy dress, activities – and see what they choose for themselves. It’s not a perfect science, but at least you know that they are doing the things that make them happy.

So where does baking fit in here?

Well it comes back to the fairy princess cake mixes in supermarket and the abundance of sugar flowers for decorating. How many young boys are really going to feel comfortable with these things? Even though they are young, children are at their most impressionable and more stereotyped as toddlers and infants.

A better idea is to skip the cake mixes completely and DIY a cake mix from scratch. Not only is this actually cheaper, it also means that you can top your fairy cakes with whatever you like.

For some great recipes inspired by the 2017 Great British Bake Off, try looking at Sunny Bake Off Recipes. Though the contestants had to make up a lot of the instructions themselves and figure out things like cooking times, you have nothing to worry about here – all the instructions remain intact and ready to go!

Though your youngest children will likely only want to do the easier things like icing, as they do get more developed, stirring, adding ingredients and measuring batter into cases are all things they can get involved with. All you really need to ensure is that they don’t get too close to the oven!

Baking with kids is a really lovely way to spend time together and to teach them a new life skill too. Many children won’t really get any experience of cooking at school, so this is definitely a life skill that falls to the parents to teach. And that’s no bad thing! Baking at home together is about bonding as a family as much as anything – plus you get to enjoy the result of all your effort together.

If you aren’t sure what to bake, or you aren’t a confident cook yourself, a refrigerator cake is really difficult to get wrong – just melt your chocolate and butter together and then you can stir in broken biscuits and whatever else you have to hand! There are plenty of recipes online that are designed specifically for you and the kids to do together so have a look and get stuck in!

Baking: it’s not just for girls!