Baking For Daddy

Super Hubs’ birthday is tomorrow, so today my youngest child and I made his cake. Little Squirt loves to help me bake, but his assistance requires me to have an added measure of patience and energy. Liquidy egg whites drip onto the floor, chocolate batter is launched from the electric mixer onto the cabinet doors, and there’s a lot of Finger-Lickin’ Germy Action going on. (Thankfully germs die in excessive oven heat, I’ve heard. I'm counting on that.)

I will sometimes choose to bake in stealth, when my child is otherwise distracted by video games or sleep, just to avoid the excessive mess. But I let him “help” me today, and we chose to make a Chocolate-Covered Cherry Cake. He put all the ingredients into the bowl, cracked the eggs, and did the mixing. I poured the batter into the pan, and then, when the cake came out of the oven, made the chocolate chip glaze to spread on top. We were the Brilliant Baking Brigade.

The part of baking that Little Squirt enjoys the best is to lick the batter off the wooden spoon. I allow him to do that as a reward for helping me. I know it’s frowned upon today by the American Academy of Pediatrics. There have been dire warnings about salmonella-contaminated eggs or some such. But I happen to believe that there’s a little too much overprotection of children these days on a lot of levels. I grew up licking batter and lived to tell about it. So I want to give Little Squirt that pleasure. It’s one of the joys of baking, in my book. I make him wear a helmet when he rides his bike, and he stil sits in a car seat. But I refuse to get paranoid over the chocolate cake batter he labored to stir for his daddy’s birthday. A few licks won’t kill him. And the memory-making is invaluable.


I think Super Hubs will love our tasty “work of art.” Now.....if we are only able to refrain from diving into it tonight......