Looking for an activity that gets the entire youth group involved, then you should try Hide and Go Bake! This activity combined a classic scavenger hunt with a bake-off and kept our teens active and involved the whole evening! This was a fun challenge that made them work together to achieve their goal. You will need to select what your teens will be baking; we chose three different cookie recipes that all had the same number of ingredients (This was to ensure the mixing process would take approx. the same amount of time per team). You could easily choose just one recipe and give it to all teams to see which team does the best!
For the Scavenger Hunt portion of the activity the teens had to find all the ingredients they would need to bake with. For this we captured zoomed in pictures of items around our church and hid the ingredients near those pictures. Also, at the risk of flour, sugar, eggs, etc. being broken and thrown all around in our church leaving behind a mess, we wrote the ingredients on 3×5 cards and hid the cards! We had three teams, so we also assigned a color to each team and used that color index card for their clues. We gave them one hour to find all their ingredients throughout the church, and at the end of the hour they would bring us the cards to trade for the ingredients. If they were still missing any we just gave them the ingredients and added time to their bake off. (We also added things like bowls, spoons, whisk, and recipe to the index cards so that they had plenty to find!)
For the Bake-off portion of the activity the teens received their ingredients, recipe, cookware, cookie sheets, and were challenged to follow the recipe exactly! We ended the timer for each team once they had successfully filled one large baking sheet, then we added any time they received from missing ingredients to their total. Once all the teams were finished, we announced the winner.
To end the evening, my wife and another lady in our church baked the cookies to avoid teens being burnt by the oven. While cookies baked, we played a few quick games, and then to end the night the teens were able to enjoy all the delicious cookies!
Rules we had for the hunt:
- No taking, hiding, or moving the other teams’ clues.
- Only go into church rooms that have open doors, and if the door is shut do not open it.
- The team must always stay together, no splitting up.
- Mark each ingredient you found, and what the zoomed in picture was of. (This helped in the event of a tie. Some of our teens found clues, but never actually figured out what the pictures were. So, If we had a tie and one team had all the pictures, then they were the winner!)
- Ovens were to be used by adults only.
Our teens loved this activity, and the cookies were delicious!
Lucas Arnold | YP
Lighthouse Baptist Church | Huntington, WV
