Baking lamingtons

For this activity, pick a lamington recipe (or another baked good) that's enjoyable enough for your child to want to cook and uses their knowledge of fractions throughout the bake. As a bonus, you'll (hopefully) get something edible at the end of it.

Father and 3 boys mixing ingredients in the kitchen.

Things you need

Lamington recipe
Lamington ingredients.

The challenge

Step 1

Follow your chosen recipe to make lamingtons. As an example, here is one recipe from the ABC.

Ensure you choose a recipe that's suitable for your child's dietary requirements.

Step 2

When you’ve baked the sponge cake and it has cooled down, it's time to start fractioning.

Talk to your child about how you could cut the cake to create nine equal cubes of cake.

If you wanted to make mini lamingtons, talk about how you could cut the cake to create 18 equal cubes.

Tip:

Sometimes talking about fractions feels like a tongue-twister challenge. But, it's important to help your child use the language of mathematics to help build their understanding. When dividing the cake, help your child see that they can cut it into thirds, then if they third each third they will create ninths. Halving each ninth will then create eighteenths of the original cake. This is a tongue-twisting challenge worth tackling!

Step 3

Finish and eat your delicious lamingtons.

The conversation

When sharing the lamingtons, get your child to use fractions to describe how many they want to eat. For example, "We'll eat four-ninths now, and we'll save five-ninths for tomorrow." Reinforcing fractions in this way can be a nice little reminder that we use and think in fractions everyday.

When reading recipes, pay attention to the servings. You may ask your child to halve the ingredients of the recipe to halve the number of servings you make. Or, you can ask your child to make 1.5 times the amount of your recipe.