Recipe Exchange: Midlothian woman wins Home Baking Association Educator Award

Recipe Exchange Preschoolers bake this special cookie in class Julie Ratchford of Midlothian combined her professional skills with her favorite hobby to create a new job for herself: She teaches preschoolers how to bake.

The former special-education teacher started bakeworks in 2007 and now teaches afterschool enrichment classes at All Saints Episcopal Preschool and Canterbury Community Nursery School.

She must be good at it: The Home Baking Association presented her the 2008 HBA Educator Award.

"Our basic schedule is to eat lunch, mix, measure, and bake our goodies, and then work on age-appropriate skills practice activities and read a theme-related book while our baked goods are in the oven and then cooling," said Ratchford, who has a daughter, Addison, 8, and a son, Jack, 5.

"Each week, the kids taste and describe what they have made, get a take-home box to share with their families, and then we save a portion to freeze and include in the lunches that All Saints Episcopal Church makes each month through their Urban Feeding Program," she said.

She says that through her class, the children get a chance to work together, bake from scratch, learn in a fun environment and give back to the community.

Ratchford gathers the recipes she uses with the children from a variety of sources and tweaks them to fit her needs in the classroom. One of her favorites is torta sbrisolona, which means crumbly cake but is really more like a big cookie. Ratchford uses a recipe she found in "Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook."

Meantime, the HBA, which Ratchford said is "an excellent resource for those of us involved in teaching children about baking from scratch," is accepting nominations for the 2009 top educator award, an honor that pays $1,000 and a trip to the HBA annual meeting in Nashville. For details, visit http://www.homebaking.org/foreducators/educatoraward.html. The entry deadline is March 31.

Contact Bill Lohmann at (804) 649-6639 or .