Cooking with small people

We baked cookies, which for four days running S has been asking to do, endlessly. I don't know why I put it off so long ...

Oh yes I do, because of the floury hand-prints and the pushing & arguing and wielding of wooden spoons at a hundred paces.

Both children were extremely eager to participate, hence the above. T caused a deviation from the recipe and method when his enthusiasm on hearing the word "egg", led him to get one out of the fridge and crack it into the mixture while our backs were turned: S was getting a bowl out and I was chopping chocolate. He dropped the shell in as well. As you can imagine, this went down extremely well with S. She didn't cry at all. Doing the recipe had been something she'd been looking forward to for days, remember. I was able to fish out the shell alright, but the whole beating-the-egg plan was abandoned, and it meant that our cookies ended up more bun-like, as they rose when they shouldn't really have.

But that wasn't the end of cookie-related excitement: T had an allergic reaction. Which was quite dramatic and unexpected since all the ingredients were supposed to be suitable for him as well, but on checking the packaging of one, I found the wily culprit, dagnamit. It was a bit of dark chocolate that had slipped past my radar, and the annoying thing was I could have just used T's non-dairy chocolate and I did for the most part (argh!) but there was this odd bit of dark chocolate left over and I thought I'd use it up (argh again!). I thought it was one of the safe ones, but didn't take the time to read the ingredients, stupidly. But to share some blame, bloody stop putting milk products into everything willy-nilly, you bastards (I mean food manufacturers, not blog-readers, unless you happen to be food-manufacturing blog-readers. In which case, pack it in! Not the blog-reading, the adding milk products to food for bulking-up and eking-out purposes). His eye swelled up, his lips developed a trout pout worthy of Leslie Ash and he had a bright red rash.

It wasn't a good look.

So Piriton and a visit to the quack later, we can admire & even eat, if we feel daring, our rather pathetic attempts at cookies. Lumpy, bumpy and slightly charcoaled as they are.


While T, of course, can view them from a safe distance and be placated by a Hobnob. You know where you are with a Hobnob.