Skippin’ to the End: The Final Gingerbread Project

29 Jan

So the bake sale for the teachers worked out quite well! I made chocolate biscotti and almond biscotti about 10 inches long and sold them for a dollar each earning me (ahem, the San Francisco Food Bank) a total of $25. They were all gone in three days. :)

For the student bake sale, I made a bunch of muffins – orange cranberry, lemon blueberry, and banana. Luckily, my friends Tina and Michelle made pumpkin muffins, banana bread (the banana muffins I made were such a hit, people kept on asking for more!), and miniature peacan chocolate chip cookies. I even sold bagels with cream cheese and bacon one morning. Let me just say that my friends and classmates were quite happy every morning this week. I can’t count how many times they asked if I had something to sell.

All in all, I ended up earning $75 for the San Francisco Food Bank! This is quite amazing since everything I sold was $.50 or$1 at the most. And that completed my bake sale. I enjoyed selling my baked goods to everyone at school. Amazingly enough, I’ve developed a reputation among my classmates and teachers for being a baker. And you know what, it’s a reputation that I don’t mind. :)

Anyway, so today I formally presented my gingerbread project and titled it, “710-720 Steiner Street: The Painted Ladies”. My classmates and fellow scholars were surprised at the size of the gingerbread. I’m not sure what they were expecting, but you can judge for yourself.

Also, what do you think of the resemblance? Does it look like the Painted Ladies? By the way, I know that there are six, but I only had time to the first four (710-716).

To liven up my presentation, I decided to test the other students to see if they were listening to me. I had just been talking about the science of baking and what the different ingredients (like flour, sugar, eggs, and baking soda) do to the dough. After this slide, I took out little bags with four different kinds of gingerbread cookies from Betty Crocker’s gingerbread cookie mix. (I know what you’re thinking: a mix? My excuse: It was 10pm last night and I still had to finish my powerpoint so I stuck with the mix. I’m not proud, but it worked.)

I asked all the students to taste the cookies and try to tell which cookie was the original, the one with 1/4 cup more flour, 4 tsp more oil, and 4 tsp more baking soda/powder. Here are all the pictures of the cookies. Can you guess which ones were which?