Messy fun in the kitchen

I think one word can pretty much sum up our Christmas – food! After a lovely few days it’s quite nice to emerge out the other side from a family Christmas. We had a traditional family Christmas and the days passed in a blur of baking, crafting, eating, and playing with presents. I don’t think I’ve ever made so many Lego sets in 48 hours!

As I said we’re always follow the same Christmas traditions. Every year we enjoy the same meals through Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. We even make the same snacks too, such as homemade sausage rolls and mince pies. Well they do say, if it ain’t broke – don’t fix it!

We’ve always tried to involve the children in preparing and making our food. I think it’s important for them to know where food comes from and you are never too young to help with simple meals. I’ve previously share a few bento lunches with you – Lego bento and Gruffalo bento are our favourites. I find these easy to make, the children have fun helping, and everything always gets eaten.

This year we made our favourite marzipan fruits.

Ingredients needed to make marzipan fruit:
Ready made marzipan
Icing sugar
Food colouring -orange, blue, yellow and pink
Cloves
Cocktail stick

How to make your own marzipan fruit:

I’d love to say we made the marzipan from scratch but we just didn’t have time and used ready made. We divided the marzipan into four pieces and added orange, blue, yellow and pink food colouring and kneaded it into the marzipan.

This gave the children time to think of as many fruits as possible! Marzipan is a little like playdough, great for developing fine motor skills. imagination and creativity. It’s also perfect for encouraging your children to play with their food for once!

We added some icing sugar to our hands as the marzipan was quite sticky and set about making fruit. Little Sis made bananas with the yellow marzipan. Her older brother made blueberries with the blue marzipan. Our guests even got involved and made strawberries and oranges.

If you like you can add detail to your marzipan fruit with cloves for stalks and make small impressions in the skin of the fruit with a cocktail stick.

The children loved getting their hands sticky, were pretty pleased with the plate of marzipan fruit they made, and enjoyed eating them all.

If your children enjoying helping out in the kitchen they they will probably love the new Toca Kitchen 2 app which allows kids to play with food virtually. It isn’t a game so there’s no need to worry about levels or high scores. Choose one of four cute characters to cook for, and 12 different ingredients which can be prepared in 180 different ways! Then get busy in the kitchen and explore what happens when you fry a carrot, then wait for the recipients response!

If you want to carry your virtual play into the kitchen then there are some fun recipes on the Toca Boca website. The end goal is not perfect dishes but ideas to inspire parents and children to create dishes together. Toca Kitchen is available from the App Store, Google Play, kindle fire and the Windows Phone Store.

This post is sponsored by Toca Boca and Tots100.