These ingredients are essential:

• Flour

• Sugar

• Eggs

• Butter

• Milk

• Powdered sugar

• Dry yeast

• Icing

• Colorful sugar pearls & sprinkles

• Chocolate & cocoa

• Baking powder

• Cinnamon

• Vanilla sugar & vanilla extract, ground nuts

• Fresh fruit such as apples & berries

• Lemon juice & zest

• Cream

These baking utensils are essential:

• Hand mixer with various attachments

• Mixing bowls

• Teaspoons and tablespoons

• Baking mat

• Baking sheet & cooling rack

• Muffin liners & muffin tin

• Dish towel

• Whisk

• Pot

• Dough scraper

• 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 understand exactly why those are important. Cakes or muffins made from batter, hand-shaped cookies or cut-out shortcrust biscuits work best. 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. Little hands usually take a bit longer to measure and mix the ingredients. Also, little ones often make a mess and need hands-on support from you adults.

• Tip 2: Use the family baking time to chat and play. When preparing the sweet and savory treats you foster your children's fine motor skills and have the opportunity to introduce them to topics about nutrition and healthy eating habits.

• 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!

Also opt for simple recipes here as well, with few ingredients and steps. Tasty and quick to prepare with children are, for example, soups, rice or noodle skillets, or casseroles with ingredients of your choice.

Homemade gifts for birthday parties in daycare or kindergarten are very popular. But caution is advised here as well: other children in kindergarten may have food intolerances or the parents may prefer a special diet. Therefore, it's best to consult the caregivers beforehand about which ingredients you should avoid when preparing the gifts. With sugar-free recipes, you will surely make most parents and children happy.

Baking and cooking with children has many advantages. Toddlers learn basic fine motor skills, e.g., when cutting out cookies. But older children who already attend elementary 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, guidance on potential household hazards such as high temperatures and sharp objects is advisable and particularly important in everyday life with children.

St. Nicholas figures and Weckmänner, Easter bunnies and braided butter loaves - you can create wonderful baked goods 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, additional 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 keep dividing and many more fungi are formed. In the process, part of the dough (sugars 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 Celsius and in the dark. To let the dough rise, you place it halfway in a warm spot and cover it with a dish towel.