Cooking experiences: Chocolate Cornflake Cakes

Friday 6th December

Aaah, childhood…Eating these chocolate cornflake cakes sure takes us back in time! As children, we remember mixing up batches of these as a special treat. We’re pretty sure it would have been one of the first ‘recipes’ ever attempted. It must be some kind of rite of passage – to be considered old enough to be let loose with butter and syrup and chocolate! Today each of us hope to be the lucky one with the most gooey chocolate to cereal ratio!

Children have a drive to be independent and do things on their own. This is a healthy part of normal child development. As children grow, they learn to do more and more tasks. Educators can help young children become independent by allowing and encouraging them to take responsibility for themselves whenever possible. It can be faster and less messy to do things for children, but they learn so much from doing things for themselves. When children practice self-help skills such as feeding and dressing themselves, they practice their large and small motor skills, gain confidence in their ability to try new things and build their self-esteem and pride in their independence. Cooking is one such activity that encourages self-help skills.

Following a recipe helps them practice the art of following instructions in written form. They were able to read each step in full or have it read to them to make sure they carry the step correctly. This requires attention to detail and patience.

Our ingredients list was quite simple and included butter, milk chocolate broken into chunks, a few tablespoons of honey and cornflakes. To begin, we defined what a recipe was and explained that a recipe only works if the instructions are followed in order. Using words like first, second, next, before, etc help children practice their understanding of position.

The children took turns in portioning the wet ingredients together into a bowl. Most recipes require some form of understanding of fractions. We demonstrated this by encouraging the children to use measuring cups and spoons. We had a set of measuring cups lined up and discussed the size difference between 1 cup and ½ cup.

The educators took on the adult part and placed the butter, chocolate and honey in a saucepan in the microwave until the chocolate melted. When you melt this combination of ingredients together they transform into a sticky, gooey, bowlful of liquid chocolate’y-ness…all we wanted to do was dive in with a spoon!

After we helped ourselves to extra bits of cornflakes, the mess on our fingers and ran away when someone wanted the washing up done…we allowed our creations to cool a little before guiding the children to coat the cornflakes in the melted chocolate.

When working with our children, we encouraged them to organise the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients into groups so that they could work on their classifying skills. The children spooned the mixture into their own cupcake cases. We placed these gems in the fridge to set to then serve after lunch.

Self-help skills are worth the time and effort in a program. The secret to success is to give children age-appropriate experiences and provide the appropriate supports to help children be successful. As educators we strive to offer opportunities for children to develop self-help skills and give them ample time to work on these important tasks. We remember that as adults, we are important role models. As we model self-help skills; children learn a great deal from watching us.