When I saw the word “Kid’s Delight” the first thing which came to my mind was Pizza. My kids love it and I am sure most kids do. I started making them at home only recently and have been playing around with toppings and cheese. Pizza or for that matter anything yeast related used to intimidate me and I still remember the first time I used yeast. I was looking at the bowl waiting for the yeast to froth up and there were mixed feelings in my head .. is this going to work? All was well and now I use yeast for a variety of things ranging from bread to naan.Making pizza is not tedious particularly when you compare it with making chapatis. You do not have to roll 10-15 chapatis and you require no side dish . Of course we need to have it in moderation due to the cheese and we all know chapatis are healthy. But I love trying out new things and if anybody is on the fence about making pizza at home do not hesitate. I assure you it will be a wonderful experience.This time we baked 2 mini pizzas for the kids and 1 big pizza for K and me. All of them turned out excellent and it was truly a kid’s delight. This is my entry for day 2 of the blogging marathon.

Ingredients
3 cups all purpose flour

Method
Mix the yeast with warm water and sugar and let it sit for 5-10 minutes until it gets all bubbly and frothy. Use  warm water and not hot water since we do not want to kill the yeast.

Next add salt and olive oil to the flour followed by the yeast mixture. Mix well and using water make a dough. Knead for 2-3 minutes and keep the dough covered and let it rise. See it has risen and doubled in volume. This took around 1.5 hours for me. If in a warmer area it should take less time.

Punch the dough down and knead for a couple of mintues. Let it rise again. It took around 30 minutes to an hour to rise again.

It has risen again. Time to make the pizza.

I normally make a mini pizza for the kids with the right amount of cheese and vegetables of their choice. For us we bake a bigger pizza with more vegetables and less cheese. Take a small ball of the dough and  keep rotating and flattening at the same time as shown in the picture until you get the required size.

Now the daring people can do a pizza toss but since I do not want to mess up the ceiling or the cabinets I leave that to the experts

If you have a pizza paddle by all means use it. I have used a cutting board to assemble to pizza. I dusted with a lot of cornmeal so the pizza could slide out easily.

We also made it extra special for the kids by stuffing with sliced cheese sticks as shown below. I took one cheese stick and sliced it into 4 strips. This is totally optional.

Pizza assembly time. First apply a little sauce followed by the toppings. We used spinach, black olives and mushrooms for the kids. The creative head aka K decided to make a funny face with the toppings. Hmmm .. not bad it does look good

Place on a hot pizza stone in a 450F preheated oven. It is important that the pizza stone be hot to get a nice crust. Look at the cheese all bubbly and yumy. It took around 10-12 minutes for the pizza to be done.

First one done .. 2 more to go. The face is still intact and we unanimously gave it a nick name of  ”Mario”.

For mini pizza 2 we added more toppings. Look how yummy it turned out. Yum yum .. kids had a blast and there was utter silence at the dining table. Wait for the stone to heat up before placing the second pizza.

And then to the final pizza for K and me. I made the crust more thin and the result was a pizza which I absolutely loved. We used more vegetables like onion, tomato and bell pepper. Feel free to use whatever you prefer. Yum yum pizza ready. Since we are making it at home we can use little or more cheese and adjust everything to our liking.

One more look at the mini pizza.

Enjoy!

Tips
1. Play around with toppings and use little or more cheese.

Check out the Blogging Marathoners doing BM#5 along with me
Curry in a hurry under 30 min: Priya Suresh, Srivalli, Usha
Seven Days of Colorful Dishes Kid’s Special: Vardhini,
Seven Days of Indian Sweets: Harini, Suma, Veena
Seven Days of Regional Specials: Aarthi, Kalyani, Pavani, Shylaja
Summer Coolers: PJ,  Vaishali
Under 15 mins Quick Breakfast: Sushma Pinjala,