Sweet Potato Cookies

Over the summer we had classes on a different continent each week, one of the most fun was Africa. The kids enjoyed all the projects we had lined up, and they liked hearing about the animals that were over there. One of the more common and traditional foods that come from many countries across the continent is the sweet potato. This recipe was a lot of fun to do, and pretty simple. Although, when you do it with the younger kids it takes a bit of extra work.

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 cup butter or margarine
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 tablespoon grated lemon peel
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1 egg
• 1 cup grated, raw sweet potato

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt into a medium bowl. Set aside.

3. Cream the butter or margarine with the sugar in a large mixing bowl. Mix in the lemon peel, nutmeg, honey, and egg. Then stir in the grated sweet potato.

4. Blend in the flour mixture into the sweet potato mixture.

5. Place tounded teaspoons of the cookie dough onto an ungreased cookie sheet. The cookies should be spaced at least 1/2 inch apart.

6. Bake for 7 minutes. Remove cookies fom the sheet and cool on a rack.

If you’re working with smaller children, I suggest having most of the tedious prep work done ahead of time. However, with fourth grade and up it’s a perfectly good practice to have them do all the measuring and grating, even though it will be a little messy. I promise, these suckers are tasty.

This recipe came from a book which we used to put together all sorts of cultural cooking activities for the kids: The Kids’ Multicultural Cookbook by Deanna F. Cook. You can find it here on Amazon.

Dehydrated Grapes and Celery String.

Yum. Photo Credit: William Berry.

For the first time in perhaps a year, I did not put together the lesson plans for cooking at the Learning Center. The complicated thing about cooking classes, is that you have to come up with a snack/dish which will appeal to the children who are five and the children who are ten. This is not a complaint. It means I have to learn to roll with the punches and have to figure out how to get my kids to cooperate with whatever comes our way. I say “our”, because if my kids are unhappy, then lo-and-behold I am also unhappy. Yesterday’s snack was “Ants on a Log”.

“Ants on a Log” consists of celery stalks that have been trimmed and cut down to a reasonable size, peanut butter, and raisins.  Somewhere, some desperate mother was looking in her fridge and wondering how in the world she was going to get her children to eat their celery. Don’t lie. You know you don’t look at a stalk of celery and think: Sweet! Celery! Celery is stringy, tough, and somehow manages to taste green. What this woman came up with to trick the kids into eating the celery was putting peanut butter in the middle. Then you put raisins on top of the peanut butter. Raisins are similar to celery in that not too many people find them tasty. They are best hidden away in warm cookies. My kid Amy put it simply when, in an absolutely deadpan voice, she said:

“Raisins are dehydrated grapes.”

Yes. And doesn’t that just sound awesome to a kid? And that about wraps up my theory on “Ants on a Log”, it is an attempt to bring together two items which most children would prefer not to know of in the first place. Believe me when I tell you that I tried searching for alternate options in the pantry.

Because they’re fifth and fourth graders, I basically let them put their food together. They cut the celery and put on their own peanut butter, with moderate success. William ended up with almost an entire stick of celery to himself and no idea how it got there. Some of them tried to hacksaw the celery. And some of them began talking about food allergies, the mythical food allergies which only surface when the food is questionable.

Kevin ate all of his and the proceeded to announce his amazement to the entire group. It was good! But at the opposite end of the table and spectrum, Amy made it about half way through hers. She then declared that she needed more peanut butter. When that wasn’t going to happen, I watched this girl begin to remove the “strings” from the celery.  There is no shortage of “strings” inside a stalk of celery. She managed to pull out about twenty of them before she gave up and just started digging the remaining peanut butter out with her fingers.

Everything just looked so tasty.

*It is important to note that all the kids’ names have been changed, for privacy reasons of course!