Mixing It Up with the Mini Chefs

So we found this recipe on F*cebook. My husband's first comment was, "It only takes five minutes, and you didn't make me one???" Joking, of course. But later he and I did try it as a midnight snack, only to be found out by five frantic children the next morning. Somehow their little noses sniff out chocolate like nobody's business! (Rabbit trail: When Eva was pre-school age and we were logging many hours in our vehicle on pre-field ministry, Pedro and I would sometimes try to v-e-r-y-q-u-i-e-t-l-y unwrap a chocolate candy and surreptitiously savor it in silence. Inevitably a little voice from all the way at the back of the minivan would suddenly pipe up, "Chocolate? I smell chocolate!" Things haven't changed much a decade later!)

With their long-awaited winter vacation now stretching interminably before them and with the nails-on-chalkboard question of the day ("Mommy, what can I doooo??") popping up all too frequently, I somehow became desperate enough for distraction to indulge the kids with a cooking lesson this afternoon.

The six of us huddled around the kitchen table with half a dozen blue coffee cups and as many forks for stirring. Eventually we unearthed a second tablespoon so two kids could add ingredients at once, thus cutting the "Me next!" and "It's my turn!" exclamations in half, and considerably softening the atmosphere.

"Try this!" and "This is yummy!" turned to "Ew, gross!" when the oil hit the mix. We should try seeing the mundane things of adult life through children's eyes more often. It was cute to watch their wonder and affirming to hear their accolades of Mommy's masterful mixing skills when they found that it was a little tougher than it looked! :)

I shooed them out of the kitchen when cooking time came, simply because a "5-minute" cake multiplied by six people is actually more like 30-minute agony with five little people anxiously clamoring for their turns and attempting to press little noses against the microwave door. One by one their culinary masterpieces came to fruition, until we had a counter looking like this:

Not quite as fancy as the original, but I think we did fairly well! Thanks to the practice run with Pedro, I knew to lower the power of our microwave to 80% and limit the time to 4 minutes, 10 seconds rather than the recommended 5 minutes. It's a chewy cake and kind of heavy, but with generous amounts of powdered sugar on top was quite well received by the mini chefs. And, hey! we killed another hour of vacation time. That's gotta count for something, right??

Here's hoping. :)