Toddler Kitchen – Canadian Animal Cookies for Canada Day – toddler style

Luath has gone through a phase of enjoying to pretend cook but when it comes to real cooking only  tends to stay interested for a short time.  Today she really engaged with making some cookies, perhaps as the process was broken into stages and it was done in a true toddler style.

The recipe was a basic cookie one -  flour, sugar, egg, olive oil spread, vanilla extract.  Once we had creamed the spread there was no mixing the egg in a separate bowl and gradually adding it in, the egg was broken directly in.  The gentle flour sieving was forgone and replaced with a spoon/pour method.

Luath loved making the dough into a ball mainly as we needed to add quite a bit more flour.  The dough was then placed in the fridge for half an hour.  During this time we went through our cookie cutters.  I selected some animals you could find in Canada (from an IKEA set I couldn’t resist).  Luath picked an ice cream cone, Russian dolls and a kangaroo.  We rolled/bashed the dough flat and used the cutters, perhaps with some excess flour used.
 
The washing up of ourselves, the utensils and the kitchen took almost as long as the cookies baked.  We left them to cool and went outside for a dog walk.  We iced the cookies and then added some sugar sprinkles and shapes.  Luath thought almost a full tube was about right.
 
Maybe our decorating wasn’t aesthetically pleasing and messy, but very much done by Luath.

We added some red colouring to the Canadian animals (moose, wolf and bear – Luath took the porcupine to decorate with stars).  I sang “Land of the Silver Birch” , a song I remember from girl guide campfires, to Luath.  We enjoyed the cookies after dinner.

Canadian geographic has animal fact sheets on Canadian animals – they are too old for Luath but we looked at the photos. 
Two of our books, Walk with a Wolf and  Blueberries for Sal worked well with our cookies.
(Luath is 29 months)