Christmas Baking for Children - Fiona Patchett

Well Christmas was fast approaching (again!) and both my daughters were very keen to help with the preparations. With this in mind, I bought them the Usborne Christmas Baking for4 Children book and we have been having good fun trying out lots of festive recipes!

This lovely book is spiral bound and has 48 pages full of tempting Christmas recipes. It starts off with a contents page and then has a few pages on baking tips before launching into the recipes. These first few pages entitled 'Getting Started' and 'Baking Skills' make very useful reading as they tell you helpful things such as how to weigh out and measure things and which part of the oven is the hottest. It also illustrates many of the baking terms that children will need to know such as grating, squeezing and sifting. These explanations are all accompanied by pictures so that your child can see exactly what they should be doing and what the equipment looks like that they should be using.

After this section there are eighteen delicious recipes to choose from. You can see all of these in the contents and there is also a handy key showing which contain nuts or if they are egg free, wheat free, dairy free or gluten free. It also shows the ones that you would be able to change slightly in order to make them allergy free. This is all very helpful things to know before you start.

All the recipes sound very tempting and all have a Christmas theme. These include Christmas cookies, lemon cinnamon stars, stained glass window biscuits, mince pies and Christmas cupcakes to just mention a few on offer. All of the recipes start with a short explanation of the recipe and this is also followed by a list of ingredients and the equipment that you will need. There then follows step by step numbered instructions that use very straightforward language and also are accompanied by pictures that show you what you should be doing as well. These are very well laid out and easy to follow. My six year old daughter can read and follow the instructions for herself but I have to admit, I do like to be with her when she is cooking - just in case! I do also like the fact that there are always extremely tempting photographs that show the finished article.

Even though it is not Christmas now, we still make quite a few of the recipes in this book - well you have to practice don't you? We have made spiced apple muffins that were lovely and Kringle that is a festive Danish bread flavoured with lemon and cardamom. This was slightly trickier than the muffins and one thing that I think would make this recipe book even better would be some indication of the degree of difficulty involved in each recipe. We have also made chocolate orange hearts which is a lovely recipe and the lemon cinnamon stars which were fun to decorate. Overall we have been very successful with the recipes which I feel sure is partly due to how well they are laid out and explained.

At the end of the book there are a couple of pages on toppings and fillings and then some decorating and wrapping ideas. These all look very handy and as the girls will definitely be doing some baking to take down to their grandparents at Christmas, we shall be picking up some of the wrapping ideas.

I really do recommend this book especially if you have young children who want to get involved with some Christmas cooking! It is currently available on Amazon for £5.37 which is a lot less than the RRP which is £9.99.