How to Plan an At-Home Baking Night

This week was our last meting for the 2019-2020 Guiding year, so we decided to do something special. A baking night seemed like a good way to end our year, as well as to learn a new skill or two. And, to my surprise, it was easier than I thought! Here are the steps to take to plan your own at-home baking night:

Step 1: Find a recipe. We chose this cake mix cookie recipe from All Recipes because it was simple and each family could choose their own flavour: Cake Mix Cookie Recipe. I made it with a chocolate cake mix and white chocolate chips and they were AMAZING. I'd recommend testing out the recipe first so that you know exactly how it will turn out, and so that during the meeting you can share any tips that you picked up.

Step 2: Send out an email with the ingredients list and a link to the recipe. We did this a week before the meeting so that families could pick up the ingredients during their normal weekly shopping trip. In the email we also encouraged families to let their Brownie do most of the baking, but to still have an adult nearby to supervise and help as needed.

Step 3: Test out your camera. I anticipated that this activity would involve a lot of demonstrating, so in order to avoid pouring a bowl of cookie dough onto my laptop, I set up a webcam that I could move around. This allowed me to show them how to mix the ingredients together, and what the cookie dough should look like when it is all mixed up. You could make do with just the camera on your computer, but having a webcam was a big help. If you run your meetings from a tablet or a cellphone, you can skip this step.

My Setup. Super professional, I know 😉

Step 4: The meeting:

Time	Activity	Details
7:00 pm	Welcome and Opening
7:15 pm	Baking How To	Remind everyone to wash their hands before you start, and to preheat their oven. I went through the recipe step by step, demonstrating each skill as we went.
7:45 pm	Guess That Kitchen Gadget How To	We had a bit of time left over at the end so we played a few rounds of “Guess That Kitchen Gadget”. My Co-Guider held up a gadget and the Brownies had to guess what it was used for.
8:00 pm	Closing and Goodbye

This was a fun meeting to run, and the cookies were delicious! I'm definitely putting this on my list of meeting to do again next year if we are still meeting virtually.