Cooking with kids can really change the way you look at cooking. It’s such fun to see things through their eyes and to experience it with them, and making delicious chocolate dessert recipes is no exception! My 3 1/2-year-old son and I have been fortunate enough to be the ones to review one of the Handstand Kids Cookbook Kits (enter to win one today!), and we really had a blast. Learn how to make the delicious Italian tartufo dessert recipe here.
The first thing you need to do when cooking with kids, presuming you are using the Handstand Kids Italian Cookbook Kit, is to make sure your child is wearing the chef’s hat. It must be perched jauntily on his head, not obscuring his vision. This is critical, or he will trip going up his step stool to reach the counter.
The next steps are to follow the recipe for tartufo found on page 52 in the Italian cookbook kit. To start with, I tore off a long piece of aluminum foil for my son (that edge is SHARP) and had him mold it onto a jelly roll pan (basically a cookie sheet with edges). The tartufo dessert recipe calls for 10 chocolate cookies. We had Oreos in the house, so we figured that would work. The recipe also called for chopping the cookies with a knife, but since my son is so little, I had him put them in a zip-top bag and pound on them instead. We broke them up together through the bag, then I gave him a rolling pin to continue smushing them into little pieces. Nothing like cooking with kids (or chocolate dessert recipes) to make you appreciate a good rolling pin…or a good seal on a zip-top bag! We transferred the cookie pieces/crumbs to a small bowl to have them ready for the ice cream.
The tartufo dessert recipe suggested making 6 scoops of ice cream, but since my kids are both small (his brother is only 15 months) and nobody wants to deal with that much sugar in a tiny little body (if you have kids, you know just what I mean), I opted to use our cookie batter scoop. The scoops are smaller, and we made a dozen. We dropped each scoop, one at a time, into the cookie pieces/crumbs to coat, and we got those on the cookie sheet and I set it in our deep freeze in the garage to chill for an hour.
What is the most important ingredient in chocolate dessert recipes? Chocolate, of course! The recipe calls for 8 ounces of chocolate, so my little chef turned on our kitchen scale, put the bowl on and zeroed it out, and poured in the chocolate chips until the scale had an 8 on it . Cooking with kids is a great opportunity for your kids to learn measuring, work on their numbers, AND make good food. We had to add 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil to the chocolate chips, so my son held the measuring spoon while I poured from the bottle, then he added it to the chips and mixed it up. We set that aside on the counter to wait for the ice cream balls to finish freezing…
…be sure to tune in tomorrow to read part 2 of Cooking with Kids: How to Make a Tartufo Dessert Recipe!
- 12 Comfort Casseroles to Welcome Fall - September 28, 2022
- 15 Classic Dessert Recipes with a Twist: Cakes, Cookies, and More Everyone will Love - September 25, 2022
- Welcome Fall With These 10 Best Apple Desserts - September 23, 2022
