Cooking with kids – cheese straws recipe

Over on the diary of a frugal family, Cass has set up a cooking with kids challenge.

The aim is to inspire parents to cook with their children. Every fortnight, Cass will post up a recipe, participants have two weeks to create fun messes in the kitchen with their angels and you can either send Cass your photos via email or, if you have a blog, you can join up with her linky.

I’m a great fan of cooking with children; it’s a skill for life and can provide some quality time spent together. Little Miss green has been encouraged to join in with cooking since she first took an interest – in my opinion, no child is too young to cook!

For the first week Cass has shared a cheese straws recipe. Unfortunately, Little Miss Green isn’t fond of cooked cheese but Mr Green loves cheese straws, so we rolled up our sleeves and headed for some messy fun.

I’m a bit of a rebel when it comes to recipes; rarely do I follow one of the letter, but that’s ok, Cass encourages us to be original and tweak things a little.

We added paprika for the lovely sweetness it imparts in savoury recipes and garlic which is great for boosting immunity. We also sprinkled poppy seeds and sesame seeds over ours for some delicious EFAs.

Cheese straws recipe

Rub 30gms butter into 150 gms self raising flour until it resembles breadcrumbs

Stir in 75gms grated cheese, 1/2 tsp sea salt and 1 tsp paprika

Beat 1 egg and 2 tbsp milk together and stir into the dough mix

Roll into 1cm thick and cut out your shapes – you can either stick to traditional ‘straw’ shapes or get the cookie cutters out and make edible art.

Brush on the remainder of the milk and egg (there’s always some left in the bottom of the jug), sprinkle with seeds and pop in the oven at 200 degrees for 10 minutes until golden

This is an ideal for children of all ages. Toddlers can mix things with a wooden spoon and they love to roll dough, use cookie cutters and sprinkle toppings on. School children can weigh things and read the recipe while older children can be encouraged to tweak recipes and add their own ideas.