Preschooler Cooking: Food Exploration

As you may have noticed, we bake a lot. It's funny that before having children, I couldn't cook a sweet dish to save myself. But when Miss arrived, I started trying to actually follow a recipe and voilà! Sweet food success.

The preschoolers love baking, mostly because they get to lick the beaters and then eat the cake. I decided that they should also start to learn the difference between all of the (mostly) white powders that go into a cake. I sense an activity!

I put out our commonly used baking ingredients on spoons and wrote next to them what each one was (so I wouldn't forget). Sugar. Salt. Caster sugar. Cocoa. Raw sugar. Self-raising flour. Flour. Corn flour. Brown sugar. Icing sugar. We looked at the differences in colour. We smelled each one. We felt and compared the textures of the grains of sugar and salt and the smoothness of the flour. We did a taste test of a pinch of each one.

(It happened to be Miss 3.5's day to visit. Hello Miss 3.5! She liked the icing sugar.)

What a great way to explore the kitchen. Sugar, was of course, the best. I was surprised that they thought that the plain cocoa tasted nice (I thought it would be bitter). Salt was a big shock to them.

Do you do taste tests in the kitchen? Read more activities for children.