Make up your own recipe for homemade cupcakes!
Cooking activities, even simple ones like this, are filled with great learning opportunities. Along with measurement and math skills, kids can develop problem solving and literacy skills as well. By experimenting with the ways that certain ingredients act and react with each other, children will gain an understanding of basic cooking chemistry, and will even learn about design as they create and make changes to their cupcake “prototypes”.
Preparation
Key ingredients are flour, sugar, baking powder, egg beaters, milk, salt, butter (or oil) and vanilla. You can introduce any other ingredients as you’d like, although keep in mind that the more ingredients you have, the more complex the recipes will be and the more you’ll need to prepare for the activity. Management of the ingredients will be easier if they are divided into several cups, with teams sharing these cups of ingredients. Make sure to label the cups properly—sugar and salt can look very similar! If you don’t have an oven, use 2 or 3 toaster ovens. Several cupcakes can bake in a toaster oven at once. Make sure to use the foil cupcake cups if baking with toaster ovens, since a cupcake tin won’t fit in the toaster.
See Suggestions (Under “Make it Better”) for how you can do this activity using mini aluminum loaf pans (found in any grocery store) so that teams have their own mini cakes. The instructions that follow are for using cupcake tins.
