When baking with kids, I’m sure many mums have the same issue – the baking has gone into the oven, the kids are excited to see the results and try out their baking, but you need to wait for it to cook! So how do you keep them entertained?

Luckily the Ella’s Kitchen Big Baking Book has several crafts included as well as lots of lovely recipes, so while baking our easy apple biscuits recently, we used the baking time to do some paper plate crafts. The Big Baking Book gives full instructions on how to make a cake stand out of paper plates and cups, which was perfect to display our biscuits once they were done.

The cake stand craft is super simple, you just need 3 paper or polystyrene cups and one paper plate to make each cake stand. Decorate them however you like, and then turn the cups upside down and stick the plate on top – ta da! It really couldn’t be any easier.

We decorated our paper plates and polystyrene cups with wax crayons. I was pleased to see that the colour of the wax crayons shows us really strongly on the polystyrene cups so it makes quite a strong and effective design. You could take it further and add as many decorations as you like – glitter, ribbons, bows, sequins!

To tie in with the shapes that we had been using for the baking, I kept some of the cookie cutters aside and used them as stencils for the boys to make the same shapes on their paper plates. This is great for Mr R and Mr T who are still learning their shapes and colours as it gives them plenty to talk about. They can also match the colour of crayon to the colour of the cookie cutter shape.

This simple paper plate craft was a great way to keep them all occupied for about 20 minutes while our biscuits cooked. It links in so well with the baking and as we only used wax crayons it really didn’t create any extra mess. I’m not sure I could deal with cleaning up after their baking and a huge craft session with all their glitter and supplies at the same time, which is why I kept it fairly simple on this occasion.

As you can see, it kept them all very absorbed and focused. When it came to time to stick the pieces together for the cake stand, I used some Bostik sticky glue dots which are double sided. You could easily use double sided tape or just fold a piece of Sellotape over.

It’s really nice that not only have they made the biscuits, cakes, or whatever you have baked – but they have also made their own stand for them so they can feel really proud to have done everything themselves!

This is not an idea that would have occurred to me, so I think it’s a pretty genius suggestion from Ella’s Kitchen really. It’s the perfect activity to keep kids entertained while their baking is in the oven and can be done as simply or as elaborately as you fancy.

There are plenty more kitchen craft ideas in the Ella’s Kitchen Big Baking Book, which is available from Amazon and other good book stores. You can read our review of the book and see the Special Apple Biccies recipe here.

What do you think of the craft idea? Do you think you will give it a go? If you do, why not share the pictures on the In The Playroom Facebook page