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.