This weekend we celebrated my amazing hubby’s birthday!  So for those of you who think that dietitians don’t eat anything unhealthy, this post is for you!  For those of you who clicked on this post hoping to get a healthy birthday cake idea, sorry to disappoint.  But for us, birthdays are fun, special occasions and nutrition takes a back seat.  Everything is okay in moderation and birthdays are great days to put this rule into effect.

My husband really doesn’t like cake.  Crazy, I know!  Especially considering his sweet tooth.  So, it has become my tradition to make him dirt cake.  This year I decided to make it extra special by recruiting my toddler to help “bake” the cake.

The first step was grinding Oreos into “dirt.”  I thought that this would be an easy step for my 20 month old to help by simply putting Oreos into the food processor.  He watched me put a few in, and then decided the food processor wasn’t as scary as he initially thought.  After he put three Oreos in the food processor, he decided to taste the cookie. (He had never had an Oreo before.)  Needless to say, he took one bite and said, “yummy!”  After that it became a race to see how quickly I could grind the Oreos before my little one could devour all of them!

The next step was the pudding.  Since my toddler discovered that Oreos are “yummy,” he was ready to taste anything else that I pulled out to go in the cake.  And let me tell you, he was not disappointed.  He tasted and loved all of it: dry pudding mix, sugar, cool whip, and cream cheese.

We did manage to finally get the cake finished, (not without dirty hands, faces, and clothes) and we had a great time celebrating the hubby’s birthday!

I hope that this encourages you to not feel guilty about eating cake on special occasions and to get your kids involved in the kitchen.  There is always something they can help do. (Stir, add ingredients, put dishes in the sink, measure.)  It can be a very fun experience for kids and rewarding for you with all the smiles on their faces.

Let me know.  What is your child’s favorite thing to help with in the kitchen?