About Make a Cake

Make a Cake is a gentle, no-ads baking game for children aged 4 to 7. The ingredients sit in a tray along the bottom of the screen, and your child pops them into the bowl in the right order — cream the butter, add the sugar, crack the eggs, fold the flour, bake, then cool, ice it and decorate. Get the order right and a cake appears, you win a star, and a brand-new cake begins.

It was dreamed up by a five-year-old, and the recipes are real: every cake is a genuine bake — a Victoria sandwich, a lemon drizzle, a carrot cake, a chocolate fudge cake — with its own ingredients, colour and decorations. Working out the order is early sequencing: the first, next, then, last thinking children use to follow a recipe, tell a story and understand the world. You can’t ice a cake before you’ve baked it, and you can’t bake it before it’s mixed.

How it works

• A recipe shows along the top as a row of picture steps — the glowing one is what to do next.
• Find that ingredient in the tray and pop it into the bowl. The batter even changes colour as you go — pale and creamy, golden for vanilla, brown only once the cocoa goes in.
• Right order? It pops in, the step lights up green, and the cake grows. Bake it, cool it, then ice and decorate.
• Wrong one, or the right one too early? A friendly wobble and it hops back — no losing, no telling off. Try again.
• Finish the cake to win a star. Simple cakes come first; fancier ones — layered, iced, decorated — are earned as your child collects more stars.

How to play with your child

• Say the steps aloud. “First we cream the butter… then the sugar…” Repetition is the lesson.
• Ask what comes next. “We’ve baked it — can we put the sprinkles on yet, or does it need to cool first?”
• Bake for real. The game is the rainy-day half of a habit; the other half is licking the spoon in a real kitchen.

More from Tadpole Games

• Fred Sort — put all sorts of everyday pictures in order, first to last.
• Doggies — a real photo of a dog, four breed names, tap the right one.
• Tick or Fix — a daily phonics word puzzle for children aged 4 to 7.