Children in the kitchen make mess, mess and yet more mess. And it is their parents who have to clean it all up. When we let children into the kitchen, we might get something interesting on the plates apart from the mess. Every chef begins with boiling water for tea and with scrambled eggs.

Recently, it has been possible to find a lot of books with recipes for children and beautifully edited cookery books for children. My daughter has had one of them for a long time, and from time to time she reminds herself of it and devises cooking experiments. "Cecylka Knedelek, i.e cookery book for children" is an amazing book. On the one hand it is a very pleasant book with nice stories which you could read in bed. On the other hand it is a treasure trove of recipes imaginatively grouped in colourful chapters. In the yellow-orange parts you can find a recipe for pumpkin pikelet or orange cake without oranges, in the purple part you can find blueberry and blackberry ice cream, and in the green part there is pea soup and broad bean paste. There is also colourful food with fruit under a warm cover and vegetable soup.

Preparing some parts of the dishes requires parental attention, but other parts children can prepare themselves.

Cooking has many benefits for children. It is a crafty way of getting them to trying new flavours, get to know amazing ingredients and, leastways with some children, to clean up the kitchen. After the demands of cooking, young chefs will maybe appreciate our efforts a bit more and maybe they will be less fussy.

Today, using one of the "red recipes", my children prepared chocolate strawberries. Use white or dark chocolate and big, fresh strawberries. We melted two bars of chocolate for 30 big strawberries. You can sprinkle the chocolaty fruit with finely chopped almonds, pistachios, or desiccated coconuts.

Ingredients:
strawberries
chocolate

Melt the chocolate in a bain-marie. Don't remove the shanks from the strawberries, quickly clean and dry them. Drown every strawberry in the melted chocolate and place them on parchment paper to congeal. You may eat the strawberries at once, like in chocolate fondue. Or you can practise patience and wait until the chocolate congeals.

Don't forget to pay your small chef a compliment.

Enjoy your meal!