How to Make Cup Cakes With A Toddler

Bear loves Hey Duggee. We love Hey Duggee and thought it would be a good idea to earn our cake making badge. I mean how difficult would it be with a toddler who has a mind of his own? It's actually easy, peasy although very, very messy. Once you have accepted that it will be messy then it is great fun too.

I used Nigella's recipe with just a little tweaking as all the ingredients can all be thrown into a food processor, whizzed up and then baked. 

Making Cup Cakes With A Toddler

This makes 12 cup cakes. 

Ingredients

125g self raising flour

125g castor sugar

125g unsalted butter at room temperature

1/2 tsp vanilla essence

1 tsp baking powder

2 large eggs

2 tbs milk

Cup cake cases

Butter icing 

100g Icing sugar
100g Unsalted Butter at room temperature
Dash of Vanilla Essence

Dash of Milk

Decorations like sprinkles, chocolate drops, wafer shapes. 

Clockwise from the left; Sugar; Flour and baking powder; eggs and vanilla essence; butter

If your toddler is little like Bear pre-weigh all the ingredients and prepare the processor. Put the cases ready in the muffin tray. If they are older they will enjoy helping with this bit. Don't forget to wash their hands first, although with Bear this adds about half an hour onto the prep time :-)

Method

1.

Pre-heat the oven to 200C

2. 

Put all ingredients, except milk, in processor. Whizz until mixed. Add little bit of milk through the spout and pulse until mixture is loose.

It's best to just pour them straight in and not try to stir with a spoon

Oops! The eggs nearly ended up on the floor but I caught them with both hands.

Perfect mixture.

Pulse the milk. For safety remove the blade as soon as the lid is taken off

3.

Divide the mixture between the cases. This mixture is very forgiving. Don't worry about it being spread over the cases or all to one side. I let Bear do three totally unaided whilst I quickly filled the rest. Then I just topped them up.

Allow the little ones to fill a few cases. It really doesn't matter if they are not perfect. Just top them up when they are not looking.

Nearly done

4. 

Bake for 15-20 minutes until risen and golden brown. Cool on a wire cooling rack.

When cooked get an adult to take them out of the hot oven

Even though they were filled very unevenly they all rose and look amazing

When cool decorate with whatever you fancy. We used butter icing, sprinkles, white chocolate chips and wafer flowers. 

Butter icing

Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla essence together. Add a little milk to soften. The icing can be dyed any colour although pastels always look nice.

I have a confession to make. I put too much milk in and so had to add loads more sugar and butter so I have enough butter icing to ice 100 cakes!

Top left; Wafer flowers Middle; white chocolate chips; Right; Sprinkles
Bottom left; Yellow Icing Right; pink Icing

Mmm these taste nice

The evidence is there!

They turned out so much better than I expected

Hey Duggee Cake Making badge, we got ours with the DVD but they can be downloaded and printed from the BBC website 

UK Food Standards advice is that children under the age of 4 should not eat raw eggs due to the risk of Salmonella. This is being reviewed and the advice is changing as long as British Lion Eggs (or eggs produced to a similar standard) are used.
It was a real shame because one of the joys of cake making as a child is scraping the bowl and licking the spoon.

Bear did enjoy eating the sprinkles and chocolate drops though.


Do you let your toddler lick the cake mixture spoon? How old are they?