Friday Fun: Love Themed Cup Cake Battle

Have you ever seen cupcake wars?  I’ve included a video below of the very first season, first episode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8Gf_xRhhYg The concept is to create a cupcake using the theme given and ingredients provided.  As the competition progresses the competitors are judged on further aspects.  For example, their first cake is judged on taste alone whilst their second batch (a selection of three different cup cakes) are judged on both taste and presentation.  In the final round the two remaining contestant needs to make 1000 cupcakes and display them.  They would then be judged on the display as well as the presentation of each cupcake and the taste overall. I thought that some variation of this would be a great idea as a Fun Friday Activity when we have another student, K11, spend the day with us.  I wouldn’t do the whole kaboodle (after all, my oven doesn’t hold 1000 cupcakes!) but I thought we could do enough that it would still be fun, but manageable. As this was our first time and K11 loves to bake I asked her to bring a heap of already baked cupcakes without decoration.  I thought I would go with a simple love theme.  I owned some heart shaped plates which would give them a good start and I bought bits and pieces which might be used in this theme.  I decided to go with the base ingredients rather than lots of heart shaped decorations.  My goal is to create a cup cake battle box.  Each month I will add more cake decorations which will give extra variety.  This month the children had the following choices:

• Icing sugar
• Butter
• Red Food colouring
• Cream cheese
• Chocolate – white, milk and dark
• Strawberry flavouring
• Cinnamon spice

They had half an hour to plan using the following sheet found here.  This sheet will double as a marking sheet.  I asked the children to draw their planned creations on the back of their sheet and label and describe it. Sugar Bomb We have not had sugar in the house for two months now.  It was frankly like watching starving children fall onto the first morsel of food they had eaten all week.  I could not even begin to describe the sticky mess the children made during the two hours it took to decorate three cakes each.  Yes really.   Here are their final cup cakes:

And I had cut C12’s before realising I hadn’t got a photo, so this one doesn’t do them the justice they deserve:

That night K11’s family joined ours for our weekly baked potatoes and toppings night, after which we sat down to judge the cupcakes.  I haven’t eaten sugar for two months and the very first mouthful hit me almost immediately.  Urg!  Sugar is waaay too sweet!  So I refrained from tasting every cup cake and only took a small taste of one from each plate.  I’m kind of pleased I took that route because everyone else felt just a little bit sick afterwards: Sugar coma comes to mind….. We graded each plate on taste and decoration and the scores were really close with C12 winning by 0.5 of a point.