Homemade Egg Yolk Pasta

Our Angel Food Cake lab left us with leftover egg yolks, so we took a break and made noodles. It was a lot of fun to play on the counter and make a big mess! I used the technique outlined in this tutorial but used a ratio of 1/4 C flour per egg yolk. We rolled our pasta with a pizza cutter, let it dry overnight on cooling racks, and cooked it the next day.

A cupcake tin is the perfect size to hold three egg yolks.

Student-Friendly Angel Food Cake Recipe

I made this angel food cake recipe in college during a food preparation lab. As a poor college student I always re-sold my books at the end of the term, but I held on to that lab manual. Every recipe in the book is as small as it can be while still offering the same learning experience as a full sized recipe.

The experience of making an angel food cake was very fun for my students, but supplies for eight kitchens to prepare the recipe would have gotten expensive.  This little loaf pan makes a cake just big enough for three students to enjoy a large slice and have one slice to share.

Angel Food Cake Recipe

Ingredients

• 1/3 C sifted cake flour
• 1 pinch salt
• 1/4 C sugar
• 1/2 C egg whites (about 3 eggs)
• 1/2 t cream of tartar
• 1/4 C sugar
• 1/2 t vanilla extract

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 375.
2. Sift together flour, salt, and 1/4 C sugar.  Set aside.
3. Beat egg whites and cream of tartar to soft peak stage. Add vanilla.
4. Continue to beat egg whites to the upper limits of the soft peak stage while adding the sugar 1 tsp at a time.
5. Very gently sift 1/3 of the flour mixture over the egg whites. Fold until flour is gone. Continue until all flour is mixed in.
6. Dollop batter into ungreased 7" x 4" loaf pan. Gently wiggle the pan to distribute the batter but do not drop or agitate the mixture.
7. Bake for 25 minutes. Cool completely upside down.

Vote for your favorite Term 3 cakes!

The entries are in! Visit my Facebook page to view and "Like" your favorite decorated cakes.  The top three students win their own beginner's cake decorating set!

Post by Kayla Pins.

Miniature Layered Cakes

It's that time of the term for the most popular unit: Cake decorating!

Students baked their cakes last Thursday.  Most opted for a patterned batter.  This student is making camouflage.

 This student opted for tie-die stripes.

The students found many tutorials on Pinterest and were very pleased with the results.

For the cake decorating unit I use my Kramer Crazy Cake recipe. It is a dependable recipe made with shelf-stable ingredients. It is very inexpensive so I can afford for each student to make their own cake.

Students work in pairs to make a whole recipe in a half baking sheet or a half recipe in a 9 x 13 pan. This will yield a cake that is about 1" thick.

After the cakes have cooled, students cut the layers using circular cookie cutters. They apply a dirty icing coat and freeze the cakes overnight to provide a nice, smooth surface for decorating the next day.

Cake Decorating Planning With Pinterest

Students continued their Pinterest fun by creating inspiration boards for their upcoming cake projects.

Their board needed several components:

• Description of board should describe event and customer
• Link to and watch tutorials used for your cake
• Each link should describe how it will be used
• Include non-cake inspiration pictures
• At least 12 pictures

I like for the students to have a plan in mind before their lab. It helps them have higher quality finished products and keeps them focused to finish during one class period.

The students really enjoy Pinterest and I can be pretty sure that the images they find will be appropriate. Those bachelorette cakes can get pretty risque though!

Cake Decorating Formative Assessment With Pinterest

Teachers know, especially Family and Consumer Sciences and teachers of lab-based classes, that being gone is never worth the work of prepping for a sub. I always feel guilty just babysitting my students with a video, so I have been tending toward technology projects in my absence.

I was really happy with how my sub and students handled a recent absence. Students started by working on their cake study guide. (Here is a link to mine. It corresponds with my Culinary Essentials Glencoe textbook.) Next, students watched the decorating portion of Just the Facts: Cake Decorating.

The most fun part came when my students went to the lab to work on their Cake Decorating Scavenger Hunt on Pinterest.  They were given a list of several basic decorating techniques and pinned each one to their boards. Boards can be shared with a text link or by emailing the board.

I like this activity because it gives students prospective on their projects. So many of them go in to their cakes expecting them to be Cake Boss quality. This activity gives students lots of inspiration to see that they can apply very basic techniques and still have a beautiful cake on their first try.