Baking Day

On Tuesday we followed our recipes that we had created the day before as part of the Writers’ Festival. There was heaps of maths involved, as well as reading, of course. Some of the maths included measuring quantities (cups and tablespoons); estimating and calculating the amount of butter in grams by using fractions; and time.

Nerida’s home group – Chocolate Cake

The chocolate cake mixture was too dry so we had to knead it. It became a beautiful, glossy dough-like mixture. Next time we would add more wet ingredients, like milk.

Children indicating their predictions regarding whether or not they thought the recipe would work (hand up means yes; mid-way means partially; down means no)

Stirring the mixture – it needed lots of muscle!

Melting the butter

Our dryish chocolate cake mixture.

Our dryish chocolate cake mixture.

Genevieve's Home Group - Marble Cake

Genevieve's home group were very ambitious when we planned our recipe, so we decided to make a banana and chocolate marble cake.  In order to make the marble effect we decided we had to make the mixture in two parts, a banana half and a chocolate half.  

Once we started cooking we discovered that the quantities we had estimated weren't quite right, so we decided to add some more wet ingredients to our cocoa mixture.

Our very, very dry, hard to mix cocoa mixture

We also had trouble mixing the butter and eggs, so we tried again with melted butter.

Adding an extra 1/4 stick of butter and an extra egg to our cocoa mixture

The banana half didn't have the same problem because the bananas themselves were quite wet and squishy.  We were able to closely follow the recipe we planned for this part of the cake mix.  

The banana half needed a lot of mashing to make them gooey enough to mix with the butter

Keeping the chocolate half on one side

We scooped the 2 halves of the cake mixture carefully into either side of the pan to stop them mixing too thoroughly, and stirred them very gently.