Cooking Games: Shut Down the Oven

If your kitchen is already hot this summer it’s going to just get hotter when you turn on the oven. A hot oven may be great for making a giant batch of cookies, but when it makes your whole house that much hotter, it’s barely worth it. This summer, all of our cooking games should be done without using the oven at all. Need some ideas of cooking games that shun the oven? Try these!

Microwave – if you can, just microwave whatever you’re eating. Sure you can’t make cookies in the microwave, but you can cook a whole chicken in the microwave so why even use the oven?

Toaster Oven – The best $20 you’ll ever spend is on a great toaster oven. Get one that is large enough for a frozen pizza or a small tray of cookies and you’ll be able to do everything you’d normally do in the big overheated oven with minimal heat waste.

Grill – Fire up the grill outside and you won’t have to cook in the house at all. Learn to make all of your meals on the grill and you can go weeks without turning on any kitchen appliance.

Cooking Games: Layer Cakes

Today I played some cooking games with my sons. We made a layer cake, and frankly after those cooking games, I’m feeling a bit sick right now. Our layer cake is delicious. My oldest son was convinced that rather than just a stacked layer cake, we needed to have a layer cake that more closely resembled a wedding or tiered layer cake. He wanted at least four layers to be present in decreasing size.

I took this request as a challenge to overcome with my cooking games, and after whipping up a box of cake mix, I used a collection of casserole dishes and baking pans to get my four rounds of varying size. The best part of the cooking game came when it was time to stack the cake. The four little layers I’d made for the cake weren’t very big – I only had one bag of cake mix, after all. The end product of our cooking games was a tiny layer cake that looked like a doll’s wedding cake. It might look tiny, but it was delicious!