Working on life skills such as cooking is of great importance to us, especially as we would like our son to achieve a reasonable degree of independence despite his disabilities. If you’ve followed us for a while, you’ll know that baking together is something we enjoy and do on a fairly regular basis.
At the moment, in this strange situation we’re all currently living in, it seems that many families are baking more together while staying at home, and I think that’s lovely to see. However, there is sometimes a shortage of ingredients, as shops struggle to keep up with demand, and I’ve seen quite a few posts on social media lately where it’s been mentioned that the shops had ran out of flour.
So you’ll hopefully be happily surprised to hear that this little baking project I’d like to share with you today requires NO flour at all and just ONE actual ingredient, plus food colouring.
These colourful lava cookies are something which Penguin and I made as a bit of an experiment a little while ago. We had dyed marzipan in lots of different colours for decorating an Easter cake we made, and ended up with quite a lot of leftover colourful marzipan. So I thought we could try making it into cookies, and it worked!
So, to make cookies like these, all you need is:
- Marzipan + Food Colouring (we used red, yellow and blue)
Step 1: Colouring your marzipan
Adding colour to the marzipan was the messiest part of this project, but it was also a lot of fun. We made a lump of yellow first, then red, then orange by mixing the two. Then we made some blue marzipan, and then green and purple by mixing the blue with yellow and red respectively. So a little bit of basic hands-on colour theory there!
Step 2: Making cookies
When making the cookies, we put the oven on at 180 degrees centigrade, and then just had fun rolling differently coloured bits of marzipan together and slicing them (knife skills practice) or just rolling them into whatever shapes we fancied.
Then we put them on a baking tray (on baking paper) and baked them in the oven for about 8-10 minutes. I would very much recommend that you keep an eye on your cookies, if you make some small and thin ones they may already be ready after 5 minutes, but thicker ones can take quite a bit longer. When they start bubbling around the edges they are ready to take out, and then they need to cool down for a few minutes before you can safely shift them off the baking tray. They should be kind of semi-soft and chewy, which me, Penguin and hubby all thought was nice. They obviously taste of marzipan/almonds, so hopefully you like that flavour!
This is obviously a very simple little recipe, but it provided some good sensory fun (with visual, tactile, gustatory and olfactory stimulation), and we ended up with something that was literally good enough to eat. I hope you and your kids too will enjoy making these colourful lava cookies!
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Linking up with:
Sensational Learning with Penguin 
What fun! I bet the kids love them. #KCACOLS
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Thank you Lydia! x
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Oh I wish I liked marzipan! This looks like so much fun, I might have to get some and give it a go anyway! x #KCACOLS
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Thank you Madeline! Perhaps someone else in your household can help with the eating (as well as the baking)? xx
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Love these!! Can use for education! #kcacols
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Thank you Ann! Yes, baking can definitely be an educational activity, in many ways! xx
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These cookies look so fun! I totally agree that it has been a bit of a struggle to buy the ingredients we need for certain recipes. Thanks so much for linking up at #KCACOLS. Hope you come back again next time x
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Thank you Shelley! Yes, we’ve not been able to buy all the food stuffs we’d normally get every week. But marzipan and food colouring can be ordered from Amazon if the shops don’t have any, so these should be as easy to find the ingredients for as it is to make them 😀 x
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These look great and I love the educational opportunity to chat through while baking #KCACOLS
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Thank you Fiona! x
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Thats awesome. Always great when you can find something to enjoy doing together #KCACOLS
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Thank you Jeremy! x
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What a great easy idea for a fun baking activity.
#kcacols
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Thank you Rachel! Yes it couldn’t get much simpler really 😀 x
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The colours look great and perfect for some sensory action. I will have to try this if I can find some marzipan! #KCACOLS
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Thank you Jade! II love how sensory play and life skills come together in baking like this, and in other kitchen activities. I’ve seen that Amazon has marzipan, in case your shop hasn’t got any. Have fun! x
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These look fab! My twins would love making these 😀 #KCACOLS
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Thank you Hannah! I hope you and the twins will have great fun making your own lava cookies 😀 x
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We love marzipan and these look great fun to make – thank you for sharing such a fun idea :o)
#MMBC
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Thank you Catherine! They were so simple and fun to make, and tasty too 🙂 x
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