Homemade organic mason jar ice cream

          6B- Ice Cream in a Mason Jar 

          By Sadie Burroughs and Amaya Heard

At the beginning of this project, we knew we wanted to make a sweet. Ice cream sounded like a fun, easy dessert that we both wanted to try making. We both knew that the summer was coming which inspired us to make something cold and sweet, like ice cream. At first, we wanted to make an ice cream machine out of cardboard, which would be our main focus. Ms. Hill said that it would be better to focus on the ice cream rather than the machine, so we decided to just make the ice cream instead. We also decided to make the ice cream in mason jars as a substitute for plastic bags. Replacing plastic bags with mason jars helps reduce plastic usage. We were going to make one ice cream vegan, and the other normal. We wanted to make the vegan ice cream so we were not using animal products. Many times, animals are not treated humanely, and we wanted to not support those businesses. We also thought that by making your own ice cream, it wouldn't cost as much as buying ice cream from a store. We estimated that the price for the ingredients was about $5-10. If we made our own ice cream, we would not be spending money on store bought ice cream in wasteful plastic.

We started off thinking we wanted to make vegan and non vegan ice cream. The ice creams would be flavored vanilla and strawberry. Sadie brought the ingredients which included heavy cream, coconut milk, and sprinkles. Black Pine Circle had sugar, vanilla extract, and mason jars. When we were trying to make the vegan ice cream, we made a mistake by only using the coconut cream and not the coconut milk. This caused it to freeze in an iceball. On the other hand, the heavy cream in the normal ice cream worked very well. We decided to make another vegan ice cream with the coconut cream and the coconut milk, but it was not thick enough. We forgot all about the strawberry ice cream, so we decided to make only vanilla. We found chocolate syrup in the fridge and decided to put chocolate in the ice cream. We tried to make vegan ice cream once more with soy milk, but it did not work out and wasn't as thick as the heavy cream ice cream, and tasted very bad. We made the ice cream by shaking all the ingredients together in a mason jar, and after five minutes, it was just like whipped cream. Then we put it in the freezer for three hours. After this, it was the consistency of normal ice cream.

I think that our project worked really well, but there are a few things that could have made it better. At first, we wanted to make vegan ice cream, but this did not work because we couldn't use heavy cream, which was a main ingredient. The alternatives did not work. An experiment I want to try in the future, is to get vegan whipped cream and put it in the freezer and see if it would turn out like the non vegan ice cream. Next time we want to make some ice cream that is vegan, maybe we should look up a good vegan recipe, instead on changing a non vegan recipe. The lesson that we learned is when you are making a new food, always make sure that you are following the recipe. Our advice for sixth graders doing this project is to make sure they have a solid plan, and do a test experiment before the final draft.




Link to recipe https://www.delish.com/cooking/recipe-ideas/recipes/a53547/mason-jar-ice-cream-recipe/

Rose and Lenka's Maker Fair Project - Recycling: Taught by Gummies

                          

For our project, we made gummies shaped like recycling symbols. We realized people don't know a lot about how trash gets sorted, especially the kids in the lower school. So, we tried to think up a way to reach the little kids. We thought about what would've gotten us interested when we were that young; food! But our food couldn't just be regular old food, we needed to make it relating to our trash sorting problem. We were going to make them shaped like recycling symbols using a molding putty we found on amazon. We quickly realized that we needed something to push in to the molding putty, so we made our own TinkerCAD design. At first we thought about making them out of chocolate, but chocolate was too expensive. We then did research about making hard candies, but for that we would need around 10 cups of corn syrup, so that was not going to happen. Then we came across a recipe gummy bears using jello, it was cheap and easy to make, it was perfect. The estimated cost for our project was around $45 which was a little under our money constraint. During the science fair if kids wanted a candy they would have to answer a question about trash sorting, for example, a question might be, "Where would you put this empty soda can: In the landfill, recycling, or compost?"

One challenge we had was with our TinkerCAD design; we needed to press it into the molding putty. We had tested our 3D printed design two times, finally working the second time, and then we realized we couldn’t print it because Ms. Mytko, Ms. Hill, and Mx. Mason were all at the San Mateo Maker Faire with the seventh graders. The big printer was also at the Maker Faire. So, we used a computer from the FAD to email Rose’s uncle to ask if he could print it for us since he has a 3D printer at his house. He printed our eleven hour print and delivered it to us in time for class on Monday!

We learned a lot in the process of making the gummies. For example,
to make candy you have to be really specific with your recipe and know exactly how much of each ingredient you need, because if you mess one thing up your whole batch could be ruined. You also have to give yourself realistic time checks, because most candies take a long time to set and you will need time to get your ingredients together and check your recipe. If we had had more time, I think we would’ve tried to make some of our candies out of chocolate and candies instead of just doing gummies out of Jello. Our advice to others attempting something similar to this would be to plan out the whole project ahead of time, find a doable recipe, and make sure you have enough time to finish your project.