Developing a passion for cooking in your children from an early age is a great thing to do. One of the best and easiest dishes to start your kids with when teaching them how to cook is pizza. Not only is it fairly risk-free in terms of kitchen safety, they’re guaranteed to love the results as well – which is half the battle when it comes to cooking with the kids.
Here are some of 11 Inch Pizza’s top ideas for making pizza with the kids (just be warned – there’s no way of avoiding a huge mess when it comes to cooking with kids).
Pizza Art Competition
There’s not a lot that gets kids as excited as a bit of healthy competition. Challenge your kids (and their friends) to a pizza art competition so see who can make the best picture with their pizza toppings. From self-portraits to landscapes, the possibilities are endless when it comes to pizza art. Simply have all the ingredients chopped up and ready to go and the kids will take care of the rest.
It may be worthwhile having a timed competition as well, lest you’ll be waiting for hours before the pizzas can go into the oven as the young artists perfect their creation. You can even have a prize for the winning creation as an incentive; to avoid conflict we recommend that everyone gets a prize.
Pizza Making Party
If you’re stumped for ideas on what to do for your kid’s birthday, why not throw a pizza party? Not only is this an affordable party option, everyone will love it and all the other parents will be jealous that they didn’t have such a fantastic idea first.
You can make your pizza making party as simple or elaborate as you want, just be sure to keep their ages in mind as this will inform their skill level and their ability to do some of the more complex steps. If you want to go the whole hog – and your child is a bit older – you can have them do every step, from making the dough to preparing the ingredients to assembling the pizzas. If they’re a bit younger, you can supply pre-made pizza bases as well as pre-chopped and pre-prepared ingredients and simply let them create an artistic masterpiece with their pizza.
While the pizzas are in the oven, you can even play some pizza-themed games. Have a scavenger hunt or play pass the parcel using pizza-themed toys or mini kitchen utensils as prizes. Just make sure you don’t get too carried away with the fun and let the pizzas burn.
Build Their Muscles
Anyone who’s kneaded dough before knows that it takes quite a bit of time and muscle strength to knead it to perfection. Get your kids to show off their strength and build their muscles by having them help to knead the dough. This is a fun hands-on activity that most kids will love – especially if they’ve seen it on TV before.
If you have several children, divide the dough up between them and challenge them to see who can knead the dough to pass the window pane test first – when you stretch the dough between your thumbs and pointer fingers to see if it will become semi-translucent without breaking. Depending on their age, this might be a bit too much for them so be ready to step in and lend a helping hand to finish the dough off.
Use Pizza to Learn
When making pizza with the kids, why not take it as a fun learning opportunity and teach them fractions when you slice it up? Not only will this mean that your kids will associate learning with something fun and yummy like making and eating pizza, but it will also help to show them the real-world applications of maths and learning in general.
This kind of teaching method can also be particularly effective as many kids have difficulty learning when it’s only theoretical or just in their head. Using pizza provides them something concrete to learn from.
Visit 11 Inch Pizza
If making a huge mess in the kitchen doesn’t appeal to you but you still want to enjoy pizza with the kids, visit 11 Inch Pizza. Located in the heart of Melbourne’s CBD, our cosy and welcoming restaurant is the perfect environment for you to bring your kids along to. Alternatively, we are also able to cater for children’s parties for which take-away and delivery options are available.
Our extensive menu – which includes pizza, focaccias, calzones, salads and dessert pizzas – means that there will be something for kids and adults alike to love. Enjoy the reward of making pizza with the kids without having to do the hard part of making it.
