Around here, food is ragingly popular as a Christmas gift. We bake, and we bake a lot. Preschoolers love helping with that, and food gifts are very easy for a preschooler to make. They’re popular gifts, too.
In the summer, preschoolers enjoy the goopy delights of making freezer jam. Get some frozen summer berries and add freezer jam pectin and sugar according to taste and according to the recipe, and you have delicious, super simple freezer jam. If you freeze berries in the summer, you can make small batches of freezer jam all year round.
Full of beans? Collect beans, lentils, and other ingredients to create recipes in a jar. Children like to pour and sort the ingredients and arrange them in layers in the jar. Sites like Recipe Gold Mine move far beyond soup in a jar to give you recipes for home-baked breads, cookies, and drinks that can all be arranged in a canning jar.
If you’re baking, bake with your preschooler. We like making sticky balls of coconut, and we also make simple sugar cookies and gingerbread mean together. Anything that involves rolling and punching dough into shapes is a hit around here.
If you’re giving a gift to party hosts, consider a batch of homemade frozen cookie dough. This takes out one of the steps from the cookie-baking process and it’s awfully convenient to have in the freezer over the Christmas season. Kids love measuring, mixing, and stirring all of the ingredients together.
Kids seem to love shaking spices and salt over batches of goodies. Create some value-added goodies and give fancy dried, candied, and salted treats. Add spices and salt to your very own nut mix, or use a dehydrator to dehydrate fall pears. Wrap these up in a fancy Christmas bag, add a bow, and these creations look like they’ve come out a fancy food store. They have, of course: it’s the preschool kitchen.
