By now we have established that I am a stay at home mom of four. So it fair to presume that most of my entertaining is for my children. Keeping them active in the kitchen is important to me. (Okay, to be completely honest sometimes I want them away from the kitchen). But mostly I want to teach them about food and preparing it. I want them to see ingredients and learn where they come from. I often talk to them about eating organic and try to explain (age appropriate) reasons why. For convenience sake we do buy packaged food (I don’t know the first thing about making chocolate), but we try to make good choices.

The Barefoot Contessa cookbook, Make It Ahead, has a great recipe to try with your children. There is no baking involved (only melting some chocolate on the stove top, done by mom). There are only for ingredients: milk chocolate, bittersweet chocolate (I used semi-sweet, pictured), cornflakes and cranberries, and the whole process is basically stirring and dropping spoonfuls of the mix onto paper. Perfect for my two and four year old!

They like being a part of the creating process and they l-o-v-e taking ownership of the final product! Such an accomplishment! Since there were no eggs involved, eating the batter was an option… and that’s always a good reward along the way.

The result was quality time with mom, happy kids and fun treats to eat. I encourage you to spend some time with the kids in your life, “it’s the best investment you’ll ever make!”

It’s also a rule of mine to try a recipe as it is written for the first time, before I tweak it. And these cookies were delicious. But I think next time we will make them a little more kid-friendly and fun (and subsequently less healthy) by substituting the cranberries with mini-marshmallows!