With the excitement of the festive season now well and truly upon us, it’s the perfect opportunity to encourage your little one into the kitchen – helping you to prep and create a range of delicious Christmas, Chanukah, or New Year’s Eve snacks.
Cooking together as a family lays the foundation for a healthy and happy relationship with food from a young age – and can often tempt even the fussiest of eaters to try new foods. It’s also a great opportunity to create beautiful family memories.
Here Chief Nutrition Officer Mandy Sacher is sharing some simple and healthy festive baking and craft ideas to get your little one into the kitchen:
Cooking Activities With Kids
- Make a batch of Gingerbread Pancakes and using Christmas cookie cutters, cut out different shapes to add a festive touch to any breakfast. You can also decorate them using berries, choc chips and yoghurt.
- Arrange cut-up fruit or vegetables into fun festive shapes as part of an afternoon snack or party grazing board. Use broccoli to create a Christmas tree and decorate it with capsicum lights and a cheese star.
- Cut out mini trees from pieces of watermelon and dip them in dark chocolate. You can also cover them with snowflake coconut cream or coconut shavings.
- Mix, mash and bake a range of delicious Christmas cookies – like these healthy Crispy Coconut Gingerbread Bites. You can swap out ingredients like white flour for wholemeal flour as a base for cookies, cakes, and snacks.
- Have a family pizza party using our sweet potato pizza base. You can cut up vegetables into Christmas shapes and design the perfect festive pizza!
- Create little Santas using our Cheesecake recipe and strawberry hats.
- Make homemade chocolates and encourage your little ones to pour it into their favourite moulds using our homemade chocolate recipe.
Here are two delicious Christmas recipes designed with little tummies in mind, which can be created together as a family, and then enjoyed together, no matter what you choose to celebrate.
Craft Activities With Kids
- Using cookie cutters dipped in non-toxic paint, create a stack of festive wrapping paper using brown paper, newspaper, or baking paper.
- Use dried pasta and beans to create a range of fun and festive arts and craft projects.
- Purchase smoothie cups and decorate them before filling them with this delicious Banana and Cinnamon Smoothie.
- Cut up oranges into thin slices and dry them out in the oven to create traditional string decorations. You can also use cinnamon stick stars to add another festive element.
- Add cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, and allspice to any sweet baked goods to give them a festive overhaul.
MindChamps Global Chief Nutrition Officer Mandy Sacher is Australia’s leading Paediatric Nutritionist, best-selling Author, child nutrition expert, blogger, and mother of two! She is also known for co-developing MEND (Mind Exercise Nutrition Do It!), the world’s largest and most researched childhood obesity prevention and treatment program based in the UK that was developed with over ten years of research.
Mandy and her Nutrition Team believe in the well-being of all our MindChamps children and that their nutritional needs should be fulfilled in our centres. Mandy’s philosophy is simple – teach children’s taste buds to enjoy nourishing, nutritionally beneficial foods as early as possible to ensure optimal development and establishment of lifelong healthy eating behaviours. Bridging the gaps in food and nutrition, this first-of-its-kind partnership is our commitment to creating and elevating a positive and lasting impact on childhood nutrition on a global level.