Willow Bakes Amelia Bedelia's Cake

The kiddo loves to bake.
The nice thing about baking is that the recipes are generally rather simple, really. You don't have to use the stovetop, usually. Often, you don't have to even use an electric mixer. Most of the time nothing is timed until it goes into the oven. All this makes baking ideal for little kids to do independently--they can take as long as they want, they don't have to worry about burning themselves, they can build up their little arm muscles and practice their math skills.

Although Willow rarely wants to make a recipe a second time (she still talks about how much wooooork the French bread was, even though she didn't complain while she was making it), if she finds a new recipe that she wants to taste, she's pretty much always up for making it once. The other day, she read Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off, and at the end of the book, Willow showed me that the author actually included the recipe for AMELIA'S PRIZE-WINNING CAKE!!!

It was very exciting, likely the easiest cake recipe that I have ever seen, and here's how it went:

First comes the flour. Notice how clean the table and the child look. That will not last:

Next, you add the sugar. Please note that child baking is NOT for the faint of heart--it took Willow over four minutes to measure out one cup of sugar. I thought that I was going to die:

The cocoa goes much better, as now Willow has a system, but Sydney also develops some alternate plans:

Then you mix the dry ingredients, and you, the audience, discover that I am, in fact, a mean and wily parent:

Shout-out to Pizza X! And also Willow grosses me out a little:

There were big plans afoot to ice the cake and frost it like a dinosaur, or maybe a castle, and to decorate it with cookies and candy obtained who knows where, but after enduring the agony of waiting for the cake to bake, and hearing me announce that we'd also have to wait for it to cool before we could decorate it...well, plans changed:

PERFECT cake.

Thanks, Amelia Bedelia!