Cook It In A Cup!
When we were out shopping at the toy store recently, this cookbook for kids caught my eye, and I simply had to purchase it. he concept seemed absoluely adorable — I wondered why no one thought of this before! Cook It Up In A Cup! by Julia Myall is a little cookbook that comes with a set of six colorful silicon cups. It was very eye catching, and the photos of the kids doing the cooking were as very appealing as well. My daughter eagerly picked this one up when we got home and took her time going through the small cookbook. When I asked her if there was something she would like to make inside, she simply shrugged, set the book down, and skipped out the back door to play with friends.
Hmm… this wasn’t very encouraging. So I picked up the book to give it a thorough going through for myself. The first few pages were promising, encouraging safety and cleanliness, and giving tips for using the silicon cups in the best ways possible. I eagerly turned to the first recipe, Easy Eggs, and was a bit taken aback. The lone ingredient was 1 egg, cracked in a cup, stirred, and microwaved for 30 seconds. I bought this kit for this? I turned past the egg recipes, hoping for something better, and stumbled on a muffin recipe — only to discover that the recipe actually made 12 muffins, and we had 6 muffin cups. The procedure has you remove the cooked cupcakes from the silicon cups after cooling for 5 minutes, reloading and baking again. So instead of running the hot oven for 20 minutes plus pre-heating, we are now up to 40 minutes plus preheating. It seems to me that the creators of this cookbook could have seen fit to either make the recipes fit six cups, or provide the twelve cups necessary to complete the recipes.
What I was most excited to see were the main courses and the side dishes. The Little Lasagnas, penne pasta tossed with sauce and cheeses was a cute idea, but the procedure itself seems to be missing a few steps. Overall, I have to admit that I am quite disappointed with this whole product. In the end, I did convince my children to try one recipe for Roasted Broccoli, but the results were less than stellar and won’t be repeated in our kitchen. With only 29 recipes in the book itself, this book was not a very good value for the purchase price either. The concept is so adorable and seems so do-able that, while we may be discarding the book, we will be keeping the cups handy and trying to come up with our own recipes to utilize the colorful kitchen tools. The execution of this cookbook sadly missed the mark in our kitchen, and I would have a hard time recommending this to anyone with children.
