Homemade Pizza Toddler Friendly Cooking

Last week the temperature soared in London and all of the plans I had for dinner suddenly didn’t seem right so it was time to open up the fridge and come up with a new plan. Pizza on the BBQ – why not?! I needed an activity for the littles as well and I always find making their dinner really gets them engaged with eating it! This is a great thing to do with your little ones as even toddlers can get involved. I do recommend prepping all the ingredients in advance if you have children helping so that all they have to do is select the ones they want. Pizza can also be a healthier option when you make it yourself depending on the toppings you choose. I use my hidden vegetable tomato sauce as the base sauce so that gets even more good stuff in there.

What you will need:

300g Strong Bread Flour (plus extra for rolling out)

1tsp of fast action yeast

200ml warm water

1tbsp of olive oil

Pinch of salt

Semolina (pinch of)

100ml (ish) of hidden vegetable tomato sauce or passata

Toppings; cheddar cheese, mozzarella, pepperoni, salami, ham or anything else you like

The How:

Put the flour, yeast and salt into a bowl – mix it together
Add the warm water and oil; stir it until it comes together

This will make a fairly sticky and wet dough
Turn out the dough onto a floured surface and knead it until smooth. This is a great part for the littles to get involved with, but be warned it is really quite sticky at this point so they will get dough all over their hands if not everywhere else!
Put the dough in bowl and cover with a damp tea towel. Put in a dark and warmish place for around an hour or until it doubles in size. If you want to have a thinner crust on your pizza then don’t let it prove for so long
Once you are happy with the proving remove the dough from the bowl and knead it again
Roll out on a floured surface. I split my dough into four smaller pizzas and we did them oblong shape, but you could do two large round pizzas instead
The dough will rise when cooked so roll it out a bit thinner than you might think. My kids love this bit as they can get properly hands on and always try to have a go at spinning the pizzas

These then need to go onto a non stick pizza tray and you are ready for toppings
Spread the tomato sauce or passata out over the pizza and then add whatever else you are using; we used grated cheddar, parmesan, chunks of mozzarella, pepparami, salami and ham
At this point you can put your pizza in the oven, but I put it in our Weber BBQ and it worked brilliantly.

You will notice that there are no finished pizza photos and that is because we had a bit of disaster right before serving when the husband threw a frisbee across the garden as part of a game and it caught our youngest son across the bridge of his nose. Cue lots of blood, crying and cuddles from mummy. The only way I could distract him was through snapchat filters and so I burnt the base of the pizza and forgot to take the finished photos! They were yummy though and I will update with photos next time we do it #bloggerfail