My kids love *NOTHING* more than to help me in the kitchen. So yesterday, while BF was out mowing the yard, we decided to surprise him with Pioneer Woman’s Chocolate Cake. Now, KB and I share some similar cooking habits. We like to use every dish in the kitchen, AND no baking project is complete without flour and batter coating every available surface.

Which is ok. Its all about the quality time, working together on a project, after all.
KB loves to work the mixer so I put her in charge of that while I measured out the ingredients.
She goes hog wild with that thing sometimes. But bless her heart, she tries SO hard and wants so badly to do a good job. She mixed her little heart out.
Poor little Baby A wanted to help SO bad, poor little baby sister who so often has to just sit back and watch big sister have all the fun. “I wanna make, momma! I wanna make, momma! I wanna make, momma!” So, what could I do but come up with a project for her to do.
I put her in charge of … ahem…’cooking’ the pinto beans.
(A little tip for those of you vying for my coveted Mom of the Year award: leave jumbo knives within reach of your two year old. Guaranteed to win you MOTY points).

I gave her two mixing bowls and a couple of measuring cups and spoons, and a pound of pinto beans, and she went to town, pouring the beans back and forth, scooping them out, spooning them back in. She had a ball! You can imagine the end result.
But I figured, even if we throw away a few pinto beans…small investment, right? And clearly less mess than if I had let her play in, say, a bag of white flour. I’m not crazy. Well, not completely.
That cake? It was pretty dang good. Particularly after I had done so well on my diet yesterday, eating two cups of broccoli for lunch and whatnot. So by the time that cake came out of the oven I was especially ravenous, which really makes chocolate cake taste SO much better.
And this morning, as I busy myself scrubbing cake batter out of my under-counter lights, and pick pinto beans out of every available crevice in my kitchen (she even ever-so-creatively filled my terra cotta fruit display with pinto beans, when I wasn’t looking), Baby A is chilling with her pretzels in front of the tv, watching Between the Lions on the DVR. In her beloved Bunny Slippers. Which you really can’t see in this picture because I really need a decent camera.
So was it worth it? Hmmm. At least I have chocolate cake to look forward to after I finish a half-day of cleaning my kitchen.