Robinsbite: Through the eyes of a 5 year old: Cooking with Alex pt 1

Intern Laura Bartee details a cooking lesson Robin hosted in this four part series. Stay tuned to Robins Bite to see more sweet and healthy treats!

Recently Robin hosted a cooking lesson for a five year old little girl named Alex for her birthday. As a present, Robin gave her the lesson of preparing healthy treats as a gift. We had the pleasure of teaching Alex three new recipes that would satisfy any sweet tooth, but all included healthy fruits as the base of the dessert! We shared tips with Alex about balancing and portion control while all enjoying these sweet treats and a wonderful afternoon together.

This is one of four blog posts to document the cooking lesson and the recipes we made. In this first post, we’ll cover the first treat – Chocolate Covered Bananas with Almonds. This recipe is from Eating Well, which we adapted it to include almonds instead of coconut. Almonds are rich in vitamin E and healthy fats, which add nutritional value to this dessert.

The first step of this dessert is to either use a double boiler or construct one like we did, and melt chocolate chips. Alex stirred her little heart out to melt the chocolate chips! We opted to use semi-sweet chips to balance the sweetness from the banana.

Once the chocolate melted, it was time to add the bananas to the equation. After peeling and cutting bananas in half, Alex helped us stick skewers into the bananas and then she dipped them into the chocolate. The bananas were slippery and Alex enjoyed licking the extra chocolate from her fingers.

Once the bananas were dipped in the chocolate we sprinkled some with toasted almonds and left others plain, as Alex wasn’t sure if she liked the almonds or not.

These bananas sat in the freezer for about an hour before it was time to enjoy! They came out deliciously rich and cold, almost like a banana popsicle!

Alex thought these were delicious and she didn’t even realize they were made primarily of bananas. And with only three ingredients, including no added sugar, these are an easy and affordable dish to make with your kids.