For our maker fair project, we decided to make a zero waste cake. We made a zero waste cake because we wanted to raise awareness about how much waste we make while baking/cooking/living.
Our inspiration for this project is that so many people waste food and packaging every day, so if we created something that tasted and looked good with little money and zero waste people will be more aware that this is possible.
Our obstacle was milk. We didn't want to waste a whole carton of milk, so we bought rice in bulk and made our own rice milk. We did not have a nut strainer nor a t-shirt to strain the milk (when you blend it after soaking it in hot water, it has a weird consistency, so you need to strain it.) We pretty much just went with it and put it in the cake anyway. On the morning of the maker faire, we were making our cake batter, there was another group who was using milk, and by accident, they used our milk. We had to improvise and use all the milk we had (to the very last drop) and a little bit of their milk.
During the process of making the cake, we learned a lot. For instance, we learned how to make our own rice milk. When you buy in bulk, you need to weigh the glass jars before you put the ingredients into the jar and the employees put a sticker on the jar. We also learned that buying in bulk saves A LOT of money! We recommend it.
If we had more time, we could have made decorations for the cake, made a double layer cake, and make it look more presentable then how we presented it. Our advice to others doing this project is to buy enough ingredients. We found ourselves running out of ingredients, so we suggest to buy more than you need, just in case (if you have any leftover ingredients, you can bring them home.)
We estimate that the project (it made two cakes) cost about $15. Before we went to the grocery store to buy ingredients, we did a lot of research on zero-waste baking. We found a video by tasty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJB5JWizc4U&t=306s and we took inspiration from it. If you are doing this project, we recommend that you watch it. The cake we made was one bowl because we didn't want to haul around a bunch of metal bowls, here is the recipe: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/17981/one-bowl-chocolate-cake-iii/
We used the chocolate ganache recipe from the video, but there is a recipe for it (it is a cake recipe but we only made the ganache: http://www.matchboxkitchen.com/journal/zero-waste-chocolate-cake
