Cooking with Kids: Jack o Latern Whoopie Pies

I've always loved to cook with kids.  While working as a nanny in college, the kids and I used to decorate cakes to look like underwater scenes and Dr. Seuss hats.  Now that I have my own child, I enjoy it even more and it's something that we've done together since she was old enough to stand at the counter with me (about 18 months).  This week, our family carved a pumpkin so I was inspired by these little cute little Jack o Lantern treats.  When I clicked onto the actual recipe page, I discovered that the recipe had too many ingredients for me to want to even attempt to tackle it (Did I say cooking with kids?  What I really meant was combining a few ingredients and tossing something into the oven. If it needs more than one type of pan or requires more than one cooking method, I'm out).  Luckily, I had made this super easy whoopie pie recipe before (it has 3 ingredients! my kind of recipe) and substituted the homemade filling with store bought frosting.  I surveyed my kitchen cabinets and came up one box of yellow cake mix and some store bought chocolate frosting so I altered the recipe to:

1 package of yellow cake mix
A liberal squirt of orange food coloring
2 eggs
3/4 c of crisco. 
 1/2 can of store bought frosting (I used Chocolate because it's what I had and it's delicious)
tube of black sparkle decorative icing

I had my almost 3 year old put the ingredients into the mixer and turn it on to mix.
Then, I helped her line a cookie sheet with parchment paper, dropped the dough onto the sheet in tablespoon-ish sized balls and baked at 375 for 9 minutes.  

After you take them out of the oven, let them cool completely (I try to time this part for nap time.  The wait for them to cool seems endless for small children) before before spreading a liberal amount of frosting onto one cookie and topping it with another.  After all the pies had been assembled, I let me daughter make eyes, noses and mouths on the cookies.  She really was only interested in doing a few so I was glad that I halved the original recipe! 

 

A few suggestions about this cooking with kids project:
Keep a wet cloth or diaper wipes handy to wipe off sticky, frosting covered fingers and spills on the counter (which are inevitable). Also, I like to have my daughter break the eggs into a mug and then pour them into the batter.  This way if they obliterate the eggs you can pick out the shell before it gets into the batter. 

Making jack o lanterns our of whoopie pies is a pretty abstract idea to little kids who likely don't remember last Halloween.  It would be helpful to first carve your own family pumpkin and to read a few jack o lantern books with a great illustrations before making these.  That way your child will have a better frame of reference and the project will be more fun.  If your child is younger than 30 months, you can help them complete the tasks with some hand over hand assistance. 

You could also alter this idea and use it for early intervention by premaking some round, orange sugar cookies and just having the little one's decorate the face.  You can use the activity to work on single or multiple step direction following, to reinforce labeling parts of the face, to teach the color orange and/or to work on fine motor skills. 

 Squeezing the dough is fun sensory play and rolling it into a ball is great way to encourage bilateral coordination and fine motor practice.