Heartbeat: The Great Paediatric Bake Off

February 3, 2021

What do you get if you take a doctor, a dietician, a handful of excited young children, their parents and a Zoom class? You get the recipe for success as our paediatric team recently discovered.

With all that has gone on this year, sometimes it’s easy to let the more fun and engaging activities that we have all previously enjoyed take a back seat. Determined that this year, some of our young patients would get to enjoy something fun but also educational, Dr Charlotte Avann and Prinith de Alwis Jayasinghe, a dietician hosted a cook along with a difference.

Dr Avann explained: “We do social events every year for our children with diabetes. This event was for children with type 1 diabetes, it’s a chronic illness, which can be difficult to manage. The common misconception that Type 1 diabetes is caused by poor diet is not true, but after diagnosis, children do need to be very careful they understand what they are eating. We used this session to educate parents and children alike about the condition and how they can best manage it by understanding what carbohydrates they are eating.

“These events help the children see that diabetes should not limit them. We make them as much fun as possible so that the children are engaged and so that they not only have fun but remember the hints and tips to help them lead healthy lifestyles. This year we have had to do things differently – this was our very first virtual event.”

To help get the event off to a flying start, the team sent the families premade packs that contained all of the ingredients that they needed, premeasured and ready to go. “We decided to do this because we did not want any families to be left out because they could not afford or did not have time to get their ingredients,” Prinith told us.

It turned out to be a great move as on the day everyone was able to get stuck in and enjoy the class. All connected virtually with the team based at Sandwell hosting the event, the step by step cookery class was very much a family affair. Mums and dads helped their children preheat their ovens; add in their ingredients one by one until the muffins were ready to eat.

In between whilst the muffins were cooking, Dr Avann and Prinith used that time to share educational tips such as how to measure out carbs correctly.

Dr Avann explained: “Many of our families do not do a lot of home cooking. We used this opportunity to signpost the families to a website that is full of healthy but tasty recipes. As well as being fun, we also used it as an educational opportunity, to go over how to carbohydrate count in baking. Type 1 diabetic children have to carbohydrate count before everything they eat to calculate the correct amount of insulin to give themselves. It can be tricky in baking as you need to work out the carbohydrate content of each ingredient. So we did this all together while the muffins were in the oven.”

The event was a roaring success with lots of positive comments from the children and indeed the parents that took part. With lots of thumbs up from everyone participating, one child even shouted across the class that they wanted to be the next Gordon Ramsey and another said she’s ready to take on the Great British Bake Off!

The event was such a success that Prinith told us the diabetes team are busy planning another social just in time for Christmas. “We are currently planning a Zoom Christmas party for children under 12. We have a Christmas party every year, but unfortunately this year it will have to be virtual too but, we are looking forward to it.

“I enjoyed this session so much that it inspired me to try baking these muffins at home. I hope our children enjoyed it as much as we did and continue cooking.”