[Food] The Cake is ALIVE

This unit in my STEAM class, food, we have been talking about cooking and baking! We talked about leavening agents, and we did an experiment where we left "prehistoric porridge," which is flour and water, out and tried to see if yeast would make it leaven when we put no food and when we put food. (I put an egg). The one with the egg leavened more.  Then we learned about emulsion, and we did an experiment where we replaced the eggs in brownies with applesauce. The applesauce batch was a lot more liquidy and squishy. In the third experiment, we replaced ground beef with lentils in meatballs. They were pretty good!

In this experiment, we will be choosing either leavening, emulsion, or protein to substitute in a recipe. But what are we doing with the ones we don't choose? Well, this is a collaborative experiment! I chose leavening, the process of making pastries rise, NO chose emulsion, the thing that holds everything together, and SKT chose protein, which is often meat but can be replaced with a variety of other ingredients! For my leavening experiment, I made two simple white cakes and replaced the baking powder in one with yeast. I then observed how much it rose, as well as the taste and texture. The recipe is below.

1 cup white sugar 

½ cup butter

2 eggs 

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour

1 ¾ teaspoons baking powder (This will be replaced by yeast in one of the batches)

½ cup milk

This recipe serves twelve people, but there are only six in my house. If I were to make it for them I would have to split it in half. 

1 cup white sugar*½  =½ cup white sugar

½ cup butter*½=¼ cup butter

2 eggs*½=1 egg

2 teaspoons vanilla extract*½=1 tsp vanilla extract

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour*½=¾ cups flour

1 ¾ teaspoons baking powder*½=⅞ tsp baking powder or yeast

½ cup milk*½= ¼ cup milk

But what if I wanted to serve 40 people? 40/12=3⅓ so I would need to multiply all the ingredients by that number. For that I would need:

1 cup white sugar *3⅓ =*3⅓ cup white sugar

½ cup butter*3⅓=1 2/3 cup butter

2 eggs *3⅓ =6 2/3 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla extract*3⅓ =6 2/3 tsp vanilla extract

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour*3⅓ =5 cups flour

1 ¾ teaspoons baking powder*3⅓=5 4/5 tsp baking powder or yeast

½ cup milk*3⅓ 1 2/3 cup milk

To round off this post, this experiment was very fun to do as I got to see yeast in an actual recipe, which I had never seen before, I got to see the difference between the two leaveners, and I got to have some cake! Plus it's always great when the hypothesis was correct. Now that you've finished this post, remember to go back and check out NO and SKT's posts.