These ingredients are essential:

• Flour

• Sugar

• Eggs

• Butter

• Milk

• Powdered sugar

• Dry yeast

• Icing

• Colored sugar pearls & sprinkles

• Chocolate & cocoa

• Baking powder

• Cinnamon

• Vanilla sugar & vanilla extract, ground nuts

• Fresh fruit like apples & berries

• Lemon juice & zest

• Cream

These baking utensils are essential:

• Hand mixer with various attachments

• Mixing bowls

• Teaspoons & tablespoons

• Baking mat

• Baking sheet & cooling rack

• Muffin liners & muffin tin

• Dish towel

• Whisk

• Pot

• Spatula

• Cookie cutters

• Knife

• Parchment paper

• Cake pan

• Paper towels

• Cups

• Paper sticks or paper straws

For baking with children, simple recipes with few steps are recommended. Measuring the ingredients, stirring, kneading and shaping the dough are usually the most fun for children. With complicated steps they quickly lose patience or do not yet fully understand why these are important. Cakes or muffins made from cake batter, hand-shaped cookies or shortcrust cookies for cutting out are best suited. You should avoid elaborate cakes — better bake those yourself and surprise your children with them.

• Tip 1: It's important to allow enough time for baking together. Children's hands usually need a bit longer to measure and stir the ingredients. Also, little ones often make a mess and need active support from you adults.

• Tip 2: Use the family time while baking to chat and play. While preparing the sweet and savory treats you promote the fine motor skills of your children and have the opportunity to introduce them to topics around nutrition and healthy eating habits to bring closer.

• Tip 3: When baking together you can even picky children make some fruit and vegetables appealing. The main thing is that you have fun doing it!

Here too, stick to simple recipes with few ingredients and steps. Tasty and quick to prepare with children are, for example, soups, rice- or noodle-based dishes, or casseroles with ingredients of your choice.

Homemade gifts for birthday parties at daycare or in kindergarten are very popular. But caution is also warranted here: other children at the kindergarten may have food intolerances or the parents may follow a special diet. Therefore, it's best to check with the caregivers in advance which ingredients you should avoid when preparing them. With sugar-free recipes, you will surely make most parents and children happy.

Baking and cooking with children has many benefits. Toddlers learn initial fine motor skills, e.g., when cutting out cookies. But older children who already attend primary school also learn a lot. Measuring or weighing the individual ingredients are important skills that are reinforced during shared baking and cooking sessions in the kitchen. In addition, warnings about possible household hazards such as high temperatures and sharp objects are advisable and particularly important in everyday life with children.

St. Nicholases and weckmänner, Easter bunnies and butter braids – wonderful baked goods can be made from yeast dough all year round. Yeast dough is something very special, because under the right conditions it grows as if by magic. When baking with your children you can easily explain this phenomenon: yeast dough consists of flour, water and yeast. Depending on the type of pastry, other ingredients such as salt, sugar, milk, butter or eggs are added. But the most important ingredient is the yeast. It is available in fresh form - as small cubes in the refrigerated section - or as dry yeast. Yeasts are tiny, single-celled fungi that can multiply quickly. As soon as they come into contact with the other ingredients, they repeatedly divide and many more fungi are produced. In the process, part of the dough (sugar or starch) is converted into carbon dioxide. This gas puffs up the dough in the form of many small bubbles and lightens it. This works best at a temperature of 30 to 37 degrees and in the dark. To let the dough rise, you place it halfway in a warm spot and cover it with a dish towel.