Dessert Designer: Creations You Can Make and Eat by Dana Meachen Rau

Capstone Young Readers: Grades 3-9. Create desserts that are treats for the eyes! Decorate like a pro with these fun ideas and tips to make amazing creations, such as a lollipop disco ball, nail polish bottle cake pops, alien cookies, and armadillo cupcakes. You may decide your creations are too awesome to eat! 

Dessert Designer by Dana Meachen Rau is a fun, simplified baking book that is easy on the kids. It is a young readers nonfiction book geared for children grades 3 - 9. Rau is also the author of Food Revolution Series, grades 6-9 (Going Organic; Going Vegetarian; and Going Vegan) and the What's Cooking Series of rebus books, grades K - 1 (Applesauce; Bread; Cake; Cookies; Ice Cream; and Pizza). Dessert Designer is also available in 4 smaller titles, broken down by chapter.

Bright pictures with easy-to-execute designs, the recipes call for little actual baking and focus on the decorating. Each chapter works on a different subject: Cupcakes; Cookies; Candies; and Cakes. This book focuses on ready-made purchased commercial items or plain cupcakes and cookies that are decorated. Examples of recipes include themed cupcakes, Oreo-style cookie projects, and quick candy projects that require no stove-top cooking - just putting different candies together.

While it is written for kids age 9 to 13, some of the projects should be left for the older kids, or even the adults, as they would be difficult to execute as shown in the book. My children are in that age group and have a working knowledge of basic baking techniques and would be able to pull it off (we do a lot of baking at home). But I think some children who have never picked up a pastry bag or spatula before might get frustrated.

Little to worry about though, this book runs the gamut of all levels of skill so any kid can pick and choose a dessert project just for them. The ingredients lists for all 51 recipes are short and mainly contain pantry items. With its colorful pictures and graphics, this was an enjoyable read for the kids at our home.

Book Info:

• Dessert Designer: Creations You Can Make and Eat! (Capstone Young Readers) 
• By Dana Meachen Rau
• Capstone Young Readers; 2013

Try three projects from the book:

• Downloadable projects: Glitzy Armadillo Recipe; Hot Cocoa Cup Recipe; and Fluffy Bunny Recipe

Celebrate Bake for Family Fun Month

The month of February is perfect for teaching kids the importance of baking, the tools necessary to complete basic tasks, and the science behind favorite bakery recipes. The Home Baking Association has a month-long baking activity list broken down by the week in celebration for Bake for Family Fun month. It is geared toward kids between the ages of preschool and the 4th grade.

The Bake for Family Fun Month was created by the Home Baking Association, a non-profit organization whose mission is to "Promote home baking by providing educators tools and knowledge to perpetuate future generations of home bakers."

Tips for baking with kids:

1. Be on hand when they cook or bake
2. Teach them the basic kitchen rules
• Wash hands before cooking or handling food
• Read the recipe before starting it and assemble all the ingredients, pans, and utensils
• Clean as you go
3. Assist them with hot items, and get them in the habit of using oven mitts
4. Show them the elements to a recipe (ingredients, procedure)
5. Demonstrate basic measurement - older kids can handle fractions well and adding them up
6. Demonstrate basic techniques - they may not know the difference between 'beat in' or 'fold in'

Images above: Courtesy morguefile and Home Baking Association.

Kids' Pastry Chef T-Shirt on Etsy

My Pastry Chef Kid's T-shirt is listed in a new treasury on Etsy. How fun!

Treasury is called 'Easy to Please...Easy to Love...' and curated by Jamie Birkholz of jaysworldatetsy. Big Thank You, Jamie!!

-- Renee.

November: Ideas for an Autumn Theme Cake

Falling leaves are symbolic of the fall season. Celebrate the month of November with pretty fondant leaves made with fall colors. How did we decorate the mini cake above? We took scraps of fondant in different colors (red, yellow, brown, and orange) and mixed them together to create a marbled look. We rolled it out, and cut out shapes using mini leaf cookie cutters. We wanted the leaves to stand up, so we just left them out to dry over night, then decorated each cake with the leaves. Fall leaves made out of edible confetti are also fun, and very easy to decorate a cake with, too.

Using Fall Colors: Other Ideas

• Instead of using fondant, why not create a cake decorated with frosting tinted with fall colors? Make swirls out of red, orange, and yellow frosting.
• Use a leaf shaped cookie cutter and create a leaf with red and yellow sprinkles for the top of the cake. Place the leaf cutter on the top, and add colored sugar sprinkles inside the cookie cutter.

Complementary Flavors

A simple cake with vanilla yogurt and pecans is great for the fall. If you’re looking to change up your pecan yogurt cake, think about chocolate. Chocolate goes well with both pecans and vanilla yogurt. Frost your cake with chocolate frosting and sprinkle chopped pecans over the top. For Thanksgiving, think of pumpkin pie and use different spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice, to create something new from an old plain yellow cake recipe.

These ideas and more can be found in 12 Months of Mini Cakes.

Book Review - Confetti Cakes for Kids

This isn't so much as a kid's baking book, rather than a great idea book and pattern book for creating lovely and inventive cakes for kids. The book I purchased is hefty and hard covered, and since I already have The Confetti Cakes Cookbook by the same author, this book just seemed a natural progression to the series.

Elisa Strauss has broken her Confetti Cakes For Kids baking and cookbook into not only creative cakes, as expected, but also cookies, cupcakes, and a section called 'mini cakes,' where the individual cake is given to the recipient just for him or her. According to her, they "are wonderful vehicles for practicing your sculpting skills on a less intimidating scale."

The book's Basic Techniques section is useful for any cake, with tips and great colored photos on sculpting cakes, covering a cake with fondant, piping and flooding cookies, and using a pasta machine for rolled fondant. The basic recipes include all the needed basic recipes for six different cakes, five different buttercreams or frostings, and three different cookies.

My favorite? The Beach Pail Cupcakes, of course. (If you holding the book right now fresh from the bookstore or library, it's on page 129). If you use shell shaped chocolate molds filled with white chocolate and dusted with a pearl powder, they would make a really nice and simple accompaniment to them.

Note: I purchased this book with my own funds at a bookstore. Any opinions are my own.