More than 20 great recipes for cooking with kids this school holiday

Need child-friendly kitchen activities to fill the school holiday? Here are 20+ sweet, savoury, baked, fried & frozen treats your kids will love to make!

School holiday time again! Are you ready to get busy in the kitchen and rustle up some culinary delights with your little helpers? Of course you are!

If you are already in the thick of the school holiday activity search, here is a handy list of some of my and my daughter Kipper’s favourite kid-friendly recipes. They are all relatively simple to make, and give yummy results. You might not necessarily want to hand over the ingredients and leave the children to it, but once they can weigh and measure, older children can probably manage at least some of these with very little intervention.

Aprons at the ready! Let’s do some school holiday cooking!

Deliciously easy recipes to make with kids

1. These 3-ingredient nutella cupcakes are a doddle to make, and pretty much foolproof. Also, delicious to eat. Even culinarily-challenged children should be able to measure, mix and dollop. Yummy results guaranteed!

2. If you don’t fancy cupcakes, try the 3-ingredient nutella shortbread instead!

3. If you’d rather have something savoury, try these cheesy omelette bites. They require a little more dexterity and some help with the oven, but make a fabulous school holiday lunch, brunch or supper. 

4. My daughter Kipper loves making soda bread! It’s a delicious lunch simply sliced and buttered, and goes brilliantly with cheese, humous, tuna, or whatever you have to hand. This simple and tasty soda bread with yogurt is one of our family favourites.

5. Or try this vegetable-enriched ‘sticky hands’ soda bread. Recipe from Get Your Kids To Eat Anything!

6. School holiday weather can certainly be unpredictable! But regardless of the sun or rain, how about some fruity frozen treats! Only one of them is ‘almost instant’, unfortunately, but the others are definitely worth the wait while they freeze into fabulousness. No added sugar in any of these. Hurrah!

7. Little fingers are just the right size to put blueberries into baking cups, to make these scrumptiously fruity blueberry-orange upside-down cakes.

8. If you’d rather avoid the sugar, try naturally sweet banana & blueberry muffins instead. They’re packed with fruit and so tasty you won’t miss the sugar. (And who cares if a few blueberries get gobbled up along the way?)

9. School holiday lunchtimes can be fun, and pretty, when you make flower toast aka ‘egg in the basket’. Older children can fry this themselves, while younger ones can supervise the toasting, do the cutting out, and maybe even try breaking an egg into a glass. 

10. More cookies? Oh, go on then. Kids love making them and eating them! How about some prehistoric cinnamon and vanilla cookies – complete with dinosaur footprints!

11. Or get them mixing and dolloping to make easy peasy muesli cookies. Packed with grains and fruit, you can even persuade yourself they’re healthy!

12. And these cocoa nib chocolate chip cookies are full of flavour, not to mention chocolate, and jolly good fun to make.

13. One of Kipper’s favourite dinners is DIY pizza. Provide a selection of toppings and let your budding chefs create their own combinations. It’s a sneaky way to encourage vegetable consumption! If you’re pushed for time, try matza pizza, and if your kids are feeling keen they can even make their dough from scratch using this recipe.

14. Cake, sprinkles and jam are all you need to make cheat’s truffle cake pops. In the recipe I use Pesach (Passover) cake, but any ready-made cake will do. You can substitute cream cheese for some or all of the jam if you want to make it a bit less sugary. Enjoy!

15. For a special school holiday breakfast, everyone loves waffles! If you want to travel the world from home, how about some delicious vegan Norwegian waffles or fluffy American waffles?

16. Or if you just want them quick and easy, try these 5-ingredient waffles instead! Perfect topped with butter and maple syrup.

17. Tasty banana scones are a great way to use up spotty old bananas and turn them into a no-added-sugar, delicious teatime treat.

18. If the little ones want to have a go at challah baking, but lack patience for rising dough, then try this terrific one-hour challah recipe. No fancy ingredients, no waiting around, and wonderful fluffy loaves out of the oven and ready to eat just 60 minutes after starting!

19. Or you may prefer to spend that hour making delicious Italian-style focaccia instead!

More delicious recipes and ideas to make with children

There are plenty more recipes here on family-friends-food that children with a little kitchen confidence, or a helpful parent, could happily attempt, so feel free to browse and get inspired. You might also like this list of over 70 mostly non-cookery school holiday activities.

Plus, here are some great cookery ideas from other bloggers:

Savoury
Spiced tofu fingers from Tinned Tomatoes
Really easy potato wedges from Eats Amazing
Cheesy baked bean pasty puffs from Fuss Free Flavours

Sweet
Pear & ginger spelt muffins from Maison Cupcake
Easy jam tarts from Tin and Thyme
Frozen fruity yogurt bites from Eats Amazing

Have a great school holiday! You can clean up the kitchen once school starts again….