BAKING WITH BING!

I think it's fair to say we are Bing obsessed in this house so when Acamar, the brains behind Bing, reached out to me asking my son and I to get into the kitchen and bake with Bing I knew he (and I) would have fun. 

Just in time for Easter we've been sent a really cool pack of goodies to get started and it couldn't have come at a better time as my son is currently obsessed with the kitchen. If I am in there making a cup of tea or prepping some lunch, from the living room he'll shout "My chair!! My chair!!" and dashes to go get his little chair to stand on and help daddy "Mix mix mix" as he likes to call it. I love it and really encourage kitchen playtime. At this rate he won't be a kitchen-phobe as he gets older and have no sense of how to make the simplest of things (we hope!).

Usually he is happy with just a jug of water and being able to add stuff to it and mix it all up or to spread peanut butter on toast perhaps. But the interest soon disappears, so what is good about the Bing Baking app is it's like he gets to watch an episode of Bing but at the same time participate in the baking process! The app is really interactive. You roll the dough on the screen and add all the ingredients in yourself. You can cut the dough in to all sorts of lovely shapes and even decorate them with sprinkles and icing once they're out of the oven. It's really good for little fingers and little minds. 

He absolutely loved being involved in making something in the kitchen with Bing. Usually he is very independent and will say "Nooooo! My mix mix!!" when I try to help,but today he absolutely loved working on it together. So, we had added all the ingredients in to the bowl, mixed it up, cracked the eggs (and had to dig a little bit of shell out...) and pre-heated the oven. He rolled out the dough and then used our very special bunny cutter and cut out the biscuit shapes. 

While we waited, we read the Bing Easter Egg book. We're not around for the Easter weekend as we'll be soaking up some sun, so Easter has come a little early in this house. In the egg-shaped book Bing and Sula are hunting for Easter eggs in the playground. But when Sula drops her chocolatey egg and it breaks, Bing decides to share his egg to cheer her up. I love Bing. I loved it before my son was old enough to get into it (I didn't go out of my way to watch it but it was on CBeebies which we always had on, i promise!). I just love how cute he is with his friends. And Flop? Well... Flop is just my parental inspiration. How does he remain so calm all the time?! The show itself tackles all the 'micro dramas' our little ones can encounter. They may seem small to us, but to our kids they can be massive, and it helps them make sense of the everyday life they experience. And I feel it shows they are not alone, Bing can suffer from these dramas and it always works out in the end. It's a Bing Thing!

This book really works for my son as he seems to (weirdly/cutely) love incidents at the moment. He has a book where a character falls off their scooter and hurts her knee. He loves to shout "Oh dear!!" when we get to that page and he'll always go back to it over and over. And with 'Easter Eggs', Bing is there for Sula when she breaks her egg. Good old Bing.

What's that noise?! Oh it's the ‘chicky timer’! 

Off we march back to the kitchen to take our yummy ginger bunny biscuits out of the oven. Once cooled, we gave them some very special decoration, as you can see! These will make for the perfect snack at his last day of nursery before Easter, or maybe we'll just keep them here for daddies? Either way something tells me we'll be making another batch in no time at all. Since writing this he's already asked to turn on the app and pulled his chair up to the kitchen! I think it was a success. Oh... and they tasted delicious too!

The Bing Easter Eggs book is available here and you can also download the the Bing Baking app for £1.99 from the App Store (Apple) and Google Play (Android).

As part of the Bing Baking blog tour, the lovely Donna at What The Red Head Said will be sharing her baking efforts also, so give her blog a visit and check out how she and her two kids got on!

Disclosure- I have been working with Acamar Films to review these items however all opinions on my experience are my own.