Kid's Baking Club - Setup Phase

In August, Megan expressed interest in forming a baking club. Wanting to support her budding passion for baking, I agreed to support her endeaver to regularly host a group of kids in our kitchen.

We just had our 2nd session - so will quickly add a few posts to catch up:

1. Pre-Planning

• We talked through the size of our kitchen and agreed that she could invite 3 friends (+ her sister, that's 5 kids we're dealing with each session - all but Sophia are in 6th grade)
• Budget - we talked about the cost of ingredients and thought through solutions to help pay for the club - they were:
• $ contribution - each participant pays a fixed amount each session
• Ingredient contribution - each participant would bring a key ingredient each session
• Recipe contribution - each participant would rotate bringing all ingredients
• We landed on $ contribution ... each participant brings $2.50
• Timing - we negotiated down from weekly to monthly (whew!) and from "all day" to 2-5pm

2. Pre-Invite

• Knowing how kids get excited and parents not always so much, I issued a "heads up" email to the parents of the kids about 2-days in advance of the invite. Wanted to give the families time to prep their child for the response most appropriate for their family. I additionally gave parents the option to review and vote on the budget contribution ideas

3. Invite

• Megan called each child and personally invited - outling the details of the club and the date of the first session

4. Recipe Planning

• For the first session, I did most of the recipe planning... those posts to come
• Ideally - will pre-plan the recipes and look at the cost of each. To facilitate, I put together a very simple Excel spreadsheet and worked with Megan to build out the equations and calculate the cost of most major ingredients - for example:
• Sugar - $3.99 for 4 lb
• Ingredients list indicated 1tsp as the serving size and 454 estimated servings in 4 lb
• We calculated $0.01 (rounded up) as the cost per tsp
• We then looked up the # tsp in common measurements and built a table of costs to get to the cost per cup
• The next tab of the spreadsheet has the recipe outlined and the cost per item, based on the measurement required

This was all very "boring" to Megan, but I think useful in helping her understand that just because we're making it at home doesn't mean it's "free."