By Bori
We are close to the end of this semester. Chicago is getting its reputation again for the icy windy season and getting dark early in the winter. It’s Monday again, which is not easy for the girls to be awake, especially for the after-school clubs. They have been in school like forever. We’ve all needed something refreshing for this tiring day. On this not-easy-Monday, we had “the most awesome” experiment ever that would awake everyone! Chocolates! We love chocolates!
We were so grateful for Miss Louesa Akin, a biochemist at University of Chicago. Before moving on to the fun experiment, she shared a little bit of what she is studying and why. Miss Louesa Akin wanted to know how things in the world would work. She loves to find out why the things worked out. Her passion in finding the causes has led to her career being a biochemist.
Following her passion, we were on the way to our journey, finding how all ingredients work together in one chocolate cake. If we miss one or two ingredients, what would happen to the chocolate cake or what taste would be like? The girls were discussing with Miss Akin; “If we have it with no milk in it, it wouldn’t be moist enough,” said Shelby. “I’d like to make one without eggs and taste it,” said Micah. From our hypothesis, we all started making each mug of chocolate cake as assigned.
The recipe was on the board as well as the assignment. The girls were very excited as they were putting flours and the cocoa powder. It was our very exciting moment! Once we were putting the ingredients as assigned, we took a turn to warm it up in the microwave. We were astonished it would take only three minutes to warm up in the microwave! Simple and fun! We had all the mugs of chocolate cake lined up on the counter. Before tasting, we compared them by looking—what differences we could see right away. We discovered a very interesting fact in one mug with no flour, which Faith made. It had been burned in the microwave within only a few minutes. We found out that flour is not just a base for the cake, but it does protect the whole cake from burning. By looking, most of them were just fine and looked very delicious.
We all had a chance to taste each chocolate mug cake. I loved Micah’s reaction to one with no coco, “Ekkk.” It did obviously not taste like the chocolate cake since there was no coco in it. The girls loved their own chocolate mug cake though they had missed the ingredients! It was another messy science we so much enjoyed. The truth is: the messier it is, the more fun science is!
Sisters4Science 