Recap: Kids Christmas Cooking Class

Over the weekend I hosted a Christmas-themed cooking class for some little foodies. The group of five year-olds were full of energy and eager to learn how to make the items on the menu: Candy Cane Cookies and Christmas Rice Krispie Trees.

The afternoon started off with a quick craft project. Sarina, Amaya, Logan and Taraji got to make their take-home bags that looked like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. All that was needed for this activity was a brown paper bag, googly eyes, red pompoms and wooden clothespins for the antlers.  While we let the glue dry, we got started on the candy cane cookie dough.

Originally I was going to make regular, iced sugar cookies, but I got inspired with doing candy cane cookies after helping out at a local cooking class. I used a variation of the Betty Crocker Candy Cane Cookie recipe. The kids loved the smell of the peppermint extract that we added to the cookie dough. I must admit, they caught on pretty quick on how to roll, twist and shape the dough. They even broke out into song singing a rendition of “Down By The Bay” to help the kneading go by quicker. Their candy cane cookies came out great!

We used the limited edition of the holiday box of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies (which contains both red and green pieces). I added a bit of green food colouring to the original Rice Krispies Treats recipe and the children were able to use a cookie cutter to cut out tree shapes after the mixture cooled down (made it about 3/4″ thick). With white icing as the “garland” (piped very well by the kids through a ziploc bag), they decorated their trees with “ornaments” of Smarties, Hershey’s Vanilla Flavoured Holiday Chips and a Double Bubble “snowball” gumball. Adding a popcicle stick to the bottom turned these trees into “pops” (and also doubled as the tree stem).

Of course eating their treats were the best part. They were all a hit, and Now You’re Cooking’s bakers-in-training made sure to save some for their reindeer take-home bags so that their parents could have a bite. All the children made sure to clean up well (I wish I remembered to take a picture); the table was spotless!

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