Hellobee

Our daycare provides a monthly menu of snacks for toddlers and preschoolers. As parents, we sign off on the menu each month, crossing out any items we don’t want our kids to eat. Most of the menu is great! Scrambled eggs, plain yogurt, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, cheese and crackers. We approve of the pancakes and waffles (there were so many parents who nixed the syrup that it’s not longer offered). But there are still some items that we’re not particularly thrilled about and cross out each month: Nilla wafers, Oreo cookies, animal crackers and chicken nuggets. We do let him have cookies or other treats if a classmate brings it in to celebrate a birthday, but don’t want these items to be a part of his regular diet.

In the past, we’d just send extra food on those days like steamed broccoli (one of Lion’s favorite foods), a coconut pumpkin muffin, or some strawberries. But as Lion has gotten older, he sometimes understandably gets upset if others in his class are offered snacks that he isn’t. We’ve been working on sending substitutes that are similar enough to what the other kids are offered. One of the big successes we’ve had is with animal crackers.

Animal crackers using a set of Noah’s ark cookie cutters.

The typical package of animal crackers is made with enriched flour, sugar, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, high fructose corn syrup, salt, baking soda, lecithin, natural flavors and spices. Not terrible, but the recipe we use when making homemade animal crackers includes: rolled oats, whole wheat flour, all-purpose flour, baking soda, salt, butter, buttermilk and just two teaspoons of honey. Also, Lion always has a blast rolling out the dough and playing with the cookie cutters. I often double the recipe and make tiny animal crackers with half the batch and normal sized cookies with the rest.

They have a very mild sweet taste, but you can definitely jazz it up with some extra flavoring if you want. Lion loves these animal crackers!

Lion hard at work punching out animal shapes while Panda examines an airplane cookie cutter.

Ingredients:

• 2/3 cup rolled oats
• ½ cup whole wheat flour
• ¼ cup all-purpose flour
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• ¼ cup butter
• 2 teaspoons honey
• ¼ cup buttermilk
• Optional: almond extract, vanilla extract, lemon extract, rosemary, cinnamon or nutmeg

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2. Pour oats into blender or food processor. Blend until it is the texture of flour. (Alternatively, you can use about a ½ cup of oat flour; we never have that on hand but we generally have oatmeal.)
3. Stir together the oats and other flours, baking soda and salt. Using a fork, pastry cutter or your fingers, mix in the butter until it forms coarse crumbs. Add in buttermilk (we typically use regular milk plus a tiny bit of vinegar) and honey. Add in optional ingredients, if any. Mix until it forms a thick dough.
4. Lightly flour a work surface and rolling pin. Roll out dough to about 1/8 inch thick and, using cookie cutters, cut into desired shapes. Place on parchment paper on a baking sheet.
5. For mini cookie cutters, bake for 5-7 minutes. For regular sized cookie cutters, bake for 7-10 minutes until edges are lightly browned. Remove from cookie sheets to cool.

Lion’s favorites are the giraffes. He likes to bite all their heads off first.

It’s a great recipe for kids because there’s a lot they can do! Lion likes to help measure the dry ingredients and dump them in the bowl. I will mix in the butter, then let him add the wet ingredients and stir them up. I will help give it a final stir then dump it onto the counter and let Lion go to town rolling out the dough. Using the rolling pin is one of his favorite activities! He likes to punch out the shapes, though he doesn’t have the dexterity or gentleness to extract the shapes from the dough yet. Lion gets very excited as he picks out which cookie cutters to use.