4 Fun Cooking Games for Kids

1. We All Scream for Ice Cream

• Make homemade ice cream in a bag by combining milk, cream, sugar and vanilla extract in a pint-size heavy-duty freezer bag. Seal the bag closed. Put that bag inside a second gallon-size resealable bag along with crushed ice and rock salt. Seal the large bag closed. Let the kids squeeze and massage the bags until the ice cream bag is the consistency of soft-serve ice cream, 10 to 15 minutes. Pull the ice cream bag out of the big bag and serve.

Slice fresh fruit and toss with a little sugar to bring out its juices. Add a couple of spoonfuls of fruit to the ice cream bag before squeezing.

2. Taste and Texture Trivia

• Fill little bowls with different ingredients to depict different flavors – vinegar or lemon juice for sour, salt for salty, honey or maple syrup for sweet, instant coffee granules for bitter and mild chili powder for spicy. Let kids taste from the bowls to get familiar with how those individual flavors taste. After tasting individual flavors, let them mix them up to see what combinations taste good together.
• Create a similar game with textures, this time filling individual bowls with foods of varying texture and consistency: pudding for soft food, pretzels for hard or crunchy, caramel for chewy, gelatin for bouncy, and so on. Tie in the taste portion by asking the kids to associate what they learned in taste trivia to what they taste in texture trivia – the pretzels are salty and crunchy.

Take the taste test further by blindfolding the kids and giving them different foods to categorize the basic flavors – small pieces of lemon or lime for sour, very ripe banana for sweet, and so on.

3. Kitchen Gadget Match Game

• Gather an assortment of common, non-sharp kitchen utensils and make a card for each utensil with its name on it. Put the gadgets on one side of the room and the cards on the other. Set a timer and have the kids pick a gadget from the pile and find its corresponding card on the opposite side of the room. When the timer goes off, see how the gadgets matched up with the cards and reset the timer to correct errors and match any gadgets not matched the first round.

4. Dishing Up a Mystery

• Choose a simple recipe that’s easy for kids to follow and print off copies. Delete the title as well as key words or phrases in the instructions. Gather all the ingredients and utensils needed for the recipe. Let the kids look over the printed recipe and work together to fill in the blanks, come up with the title and then make the dish and enjoy it together.