Making Strawberry Lemonade with Kids

E recently saw something about making lemonade on a show and asked me to make some with her. Sure, it’s almost Christmas but hey, a yummy homemade refreshment is always nice, no matter the season 🙂 Plus, there’s so much to learn from the experience!

We watched this video and decided to {more or less} follow its instructions to make Strawberry Lemonade.

(E was 4 years and 1 month old.)

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 To make Strawberry Lemonade, you’ll need:

 

• 2 cups strawberries, cut in half
• 8 lemons
• 1 cup sugar
• 6 cups water
• 1 T lemon zest.

{These are the original amounts from the video above. There’s a lot of leeway, and you can easily adjust to taste or what you have on hand. We skipped the lemon zest, and since we only had four lemons, we added half a cup of lemon juice from a bottle in the end.)

This is a really simple recipe, and E was able to do a lot of it herself or with minimal help.

After we’d watched the video once, we talked about what we needed. She repeated the ingredients to me, and we gathered them on the counter.

We measured one cup of water and one cup of sugar together, combined them in a bowl and put it in the microwave for 2 minutes. {The original recipe said to add some lemon zest, which we omitted because I didn’t trust our lemon peel. I honestly don’t think it made a big difference in the finished lemonade.}

Pushing buttons – always so much fun 🙂

While the sugar water was heating up, E started cutting the strawberries in half and putting them into the measuring cup. {She used a sharp knife, and she’s very good with it.}

I rolled the lemons on the counter to break the membranes, then squeezed out the juice.

E gave it a shot as well but it hurt her fingers, so she asked me to do the rest. {I didn’t tell her that it hurt my fingers, too 😉 I was happy to take one for the team but now that we’ve made lemonade a couple of times, I’m very ready to buy a lemon juicer for next time.}

We carefully strained out the seeds. I tried to pick them out in order to put the pulp back but gave up after a short while – it just didn’t seem worth it, as there were a LOT of seeds. This is how much juice we got from our four lemons.

After she’d cut up two cups’ worth of strawberries and put them into the blender, E got to push another button.

When the strawberries had been turned into a puree,

E added the lemon juice and sugar water that had had some time to cool down a bit. {Turns out we don’t own a pitcher. Another item to add to the shopping list 😉 }

Finally, she added five cups of water that we measured out and counted together.

E insisted on cleaning up the counter

 before we were able to taste our strawberry lemonade.

 

It was very apparent that we were missing half the lemon juice we were supposed to use according to the recipe. {At least it was apparent to me, E said it tasted great 😉 }

I added about 1/2 cup of  lemon juice from a bottle to make it taste like lemonade, not just strawberry sugar water.

The next time we made strawberry lemonade, we had 7 lemons, and it came out pretty tart. I think the stuff from the bottle is a lot milder than freshly squeezed juice.

You’ll have to taste your own strawberry lemonade and adjust the amount of sugar and/or lemon juice. It’s probably a good idea not to add all your lemon juice at once. I think they said that in the video, I guess we’re just not that patient 😉 

 

Have you made your own strawberry lemonade with kids? Do you want to try this recipe? I’d love to hear from you, leave a comment below!

 

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