We are always baking something in the kitchen, you will have noticed that if you read the blog regularly.  Monkey really seems to enjoy it, and I’m happy to encourage him. We were really happy to receive Let’s Bake – a child friendly cook book from Cathryn Dresser.

52 easy recipes – one for every week of the year! Perfect for parents and children baking together, from the star of the 2012 series of the BBC’s THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF and busy mum of two, Cathryn Dresser.

Let’s Bake has a number of Handy Hints pages at the beginning of this hard back book – great for any young chef.

We had a look through the recipe book and decided there was only one thing to try – pizza!! Monkey loves Pizza.  I often make pizzas using naan breads as bases, but we’ve never made the base from scratch.  Time to give it a go.

The recipes give a full list of the ingredients required as well as the equipment needed to complete the recipe.

So off we went, I was in charge of mixing the flour, yeast and salt to make the dough, Monkey was in charge of kneading.  I have one niggle with the recipe, it mentions using 3/4 of the oil/water mixture but never tells you what to do with the rest.  A friend has since suggested that it was probably for you to add as required to the mixture if too dry?  I think for a children’s cookbook (and obviously for me too) this should have been clearer.  But checking with others how have tried different recipes; they’ve had no issues.

Anyway, Monkey loved kneading the dough, although I did have to help him.  15 minutes kneading for a 4 year old is a little too much.  I’ll build him up to that!  We’d baked bread for the first time recently so he was aware of yeast and it’s ‘magic’ powers.  He was excited to see what happened when we placed our bowl full of kneaded dough, covered with cling film, in our airing cupboard for an hour.

Whilst the dough was resting, we made our pizza sauce and decided which toppings we would have.  When our dough had risen I divided it in two and rolled out two pizza bases then Monkey spread the sauce and put on his topping.  I popped them in the oven and 20 minutes later (the recipe say 25 minutes but our fan assisted oven was fine with 20 minutes).

The results?  Scrumptious!!  Our totally homemade pizzas did not last long and it was so easy.  We’ll definitely be making more soon!

There are lots of photographs with each recipe – always a great idea for children to visualise the different steps.

You might want to see what Eileen, Fiona and Jenny cooked up with their kids.

I’m sure over the next few years Monkey will enjoy Let’s Bake and will be trying out lots more of the recipes.

Priced at £12.99, this is a great addition to our cookbook shelf and Monkey is quite happy that he now has his own book!

disclaimer:  we were sent this book in exchange for an honest review.