Adorable Toddler Cookbook Includes Recipe for Pancakes with Just One Ingredient

updated Jun 10, 2019

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Recently, a family friend showed me a battered collection of recipes from her sons’ elementary school. The teacher asked each child to obtain an old family recipe from their parents, and the kids came back with recipes for chocolate chip cookies, angel food cake, and brownies. It was a touching exercise that helped the kids connect with family history and perhaps even get interested in cooking.

So it’s not surprising that another teacher recently had a similar idea, with a twist: The pre-k kids had to make up their own recipes. The results, which the uncle of one student posted on Twitter, are predictably adorable and hilarious.

Take Ethan’s recipe for eggs, which includes the ingredients pancakes, Skittles, and sugar. “You can cook it,” directs Ethan, but you can also go to his mom’s house, because she makes eggs all the time. Sebastian’s recipe for pancakes is even less specific: In the ingredients section, Sebastian writes “Salt and that’s it.”

The teacher in charge of the cookbook assignment must have been recording the students’ stream of consciousness thoughts because the cooking instructions often dissolve into nonsense. To be expected, of course, when you’re trying to carry on a conversation with a toddler, but the result is some straight-up surreal recipes.

For instance, Ariana’s macaroni recipe quickly turns into a meditation on a birthday party she’s attending at a swimming pool (she also includes strawberries in the ingredients list because they’re healthy, and she’s not wrong about that.) And Joe, who started out the assignment wanting to make tacos, decided halfway through he actually prefers cheesy roll-ups, which as it turns out, can easily be purchased at Taco Bell.

I praise these cute kids for their creativity. They seem to be in on the joke at least a little bit. Ethan specifies that eggs can be purchased at Texas Roadhouse, while Sebastian claims that pancakes cost $70. Sounds like the exercise was pure fun, simply meant to get the kids, and maybe the parents too, laughing. But if it gets youngsters even slightly interested in cooking, then all the better.