My mother taught cooking to my Girl Scout troops every year from when we were ten up through age 14, in our home kitchen. The favorite was always when we made pizza from scratch, because pizza seems like a very magical food and yet so very taken for granted (this was in New Jersey in the 1980s, before there were any Domino's in the area, because every town already had 2-3 competing pizzerias doing New York style pies for delivery or take-out). You mix up the dough and then while it's rising a bit do the shredding of the cheese or prepping other ingredients. (There isn't time for making the sauce from scratch so it came from a jar.) When I was in kindergarten, our first baking project in school was to make dinner rolls and butter. I'm not sure why our teacher thought this was a good idea but she had us do it in the school cafeteria one day. We churned the butter ourselves from cream, which seemed magical on its own, and then made the kind of rolls that are supposed to be three balls that bake together into a roll. None of them glommed together so we ended up with dozens of small baked bread balls that were nonetheless delicious with fresh-churned butter.
If you're ok with getting messy, pasta also seems like a fun thing to do with a group because it's like working with play-dough you can eat! (Or, perhaps, just plain "dough"?) There's no wrong shape for pasta, except maybe a huge ball, and you can use all sorts of household implements to form, add colors or herbs, etc.
My mother taught cooking to my Girl Scout troops every year from when we were ten up through age 14, in our home kitchen. The favorite was always when we made pizza from scratch, because pizza seems like a very magical food and yet so very taken for granted (this was in New Jersey in the 1980s, before there were any Domino's in the area, because every town already had 2-3 competing pizzerias doing New York style pies for delivery or take-out). You mix up the dough and then while it's rising a bit do the shredding of the cheese or prepping other ingredients. (There isn't time for making the sauce from scratch so it came from a jar.) When I was in kindergarten, our first baking project in school was to make dinner rolls and butter. I'm not sure why our teacher thought this was a good idea but she had us do it in the school cafeteria one day. We churned the butter ourselves from cream, which seemed magical on its own, and then made the kind of rolls that are supposed to be three balls that bake together into a roll. None of them glommed together so we ended up with dozens of small baked bread balls that were nonetheless delicious with fresh-churned butter.
If you're ok with getting messy, pasta also seems like a fun thing to do with a group because it's like working with play-dough you can eat! (Or, perhaps, just plain "dough"?) There's no wrong shape for pasta, except maybe a huge ball, and you can use all sorts of household implements to form, add colors or herbs, etc.
For a younger audience, H has really liked this book: https://shop.americastestkitchen.com/stir-crack-whisk-bake.html
I’m just returning from a brief getaway to Montréal, where we took a Montréal bagel making workshop taught in a home kitchen.
The whole process can be done in 90 minutes from measuring to eating.