Baking Holiday Treats with Kids

Sweets, chocolates and cookies galore! The holidays are here and it’s time for some traditional sweet holiday treats. Instead of spending money on unhealthy pre-made desserts, why not create your own family tradition and make delicious and nutritious holiday sweets. Let Truestar show you how you and your family can have fun in the kitchen this holiday season.

Holiday Kitchen Fun

• Choose your recipe: Get your kids involved with choosing your family’s favorite holiday recipes. Give them two or three healthy options to choose from, as kids love to be able to make their own decisions.
• Choose age-appropriately: Keep your children’s ages and abilities in mind when deciding on a recipe. Very young children can be happy stirring ingredients while older children may want to read the recipe, physically do some of the steps or add their own creative spin to the recipe by adding extra ingredients.
• Involve your kids as much as possible: Kids love to eat things that they’ve had a hand in making. Take them grocery shopping to teach them about making healthy food choices and involve your kids in the preparing and cooking process. Kids love to knead and roll out dough and design their own cookies using cookie-cutters and decorative toppings like sprinkles, chocolate chips or raisins.
• Make the kitchen festive: When decorating the house, don’t forget to make the kitchen festive too! Decorations, costumes and music can all help to set the mood for a great family holiday tradition.

Recipes:

Ginger Spelt Cookies

Hanukkah Jelly Doughnuts

Soft and Delicious Oatmeal Cookies

Don’t worry if your children are indulging a bit more than usual this holiday season. Sweets can and should be incorporated into a healthy, balanced diet. Pay attention to the proportions that your child is eating, rather than just the specific types of food. Including a wide variety of foods, such as those on the Truestar Kids meal plans is what really matters! And, yes the holidays are a time of celebrations when children may indulge in a bit more than usual. Just try to balance out some of those higher fat sugary treats with some healthier foods or get your kids active to burn off some of those extra calories. Check out fitness for kids.

Have a happy and healthy holiday season!

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