By Kate Schroeder
Last week the smell of cake batter and frosting was flowing through the air by room 140 as the Foods 1 students were baking and designing their cakes for the cakes project which takes place each semester.
Each table, consisting of four students, was assigned to bake a one-layer novelty or traditional shaped cake from a cake box. Each group had to make and dye their own frosting to decorate their cake in the theme of their choice.

As the groups were trying to think up creative ideas to decorate their cake, senior Jim Brault came across the idea of making a cake decorated like substitute teacher Dino Trinh, who also works in the Math Science Resource Room.
“I bonded with him this year,” Brault said. “I couldn’t think of anything, then I thought of Mr. Trinh. Everyone else [in my group] was down with it.”
Before Brault and his group members, seniors Susie Lello, Kris Daorerk and Andy Henning, were able to make the cake, Brault asked Trinh permission to bake a cake like him.
“I was pleasantly surprised and honored,” Trinh said. “I really enjoyed it and was impressed.”
For Brault and his group, the hardest part of the project was getting the details right. They worked off a picture that Trinh gave to Brault and had a hard time shading all the colors of the frosting to match the colors in the picture. Also they ran into problems when they carved out the bow tie.
“It just fell apart after we cut it out, [but we] bound it up with frosting,” Brault said.
Similar to Brault’s group, freshman Lauren Yearian and her group members freshmen Nicki Canonaco, Jenny Delaney, and Caroline Erickson ran into trouble when they took out their cake too early from the oven. They went over to Erikson’s house outside of class to redo their cake and to decorate it.
“A lot of other groups had a beach theme,” Yearian said. “We had to compete against the other kitchens.”
All their hard work payed off because Yearian’s group’s cake was voted “Most Creative” out of three categories including “Best overall” and “Best Skill.”
Their cake, called “Welcome to the Beach,” was topped with sprinkled brown sugar as sand, cut ribbons for towels, mini umbrellas, Polly Pockets taken from Erikson’s little sister, a toy surf board and blue frosting spread to look like moving waves.

After all the cakes were baked and decorated throughout the course of one week students and staff could come in after school on Thursday November 5 to vote on their favorite cakes.  Foods teacher Amy Collins emailed the pictures of all 24 cakes to every teacher on November 6 to vote for the cakes they like the best.
“Ours won [“Overall Favorite”] because every one loves [Trinh]. It looked pretty close to him,” Brault said. “No one else made a person cake. A lot of teachers voted on it.”
“I even thought there was some similarity,” Trinh said. “I voted for all three categories for my cake.”
Win or lose, the students in Foods class really enjoyed this project because of the freedom they had with designing their cake.
“I liked the whole idea with coming up with our own cake design,” Yearian said. “[You] picked every color and how you wanted it to look like.”
“[This project] was one of my favorites in my PHS career,” Brault said. “We put [the cake] together and it looked better and better everyday. I was happy with how it turned out.”
Look for the smell of cake batter and frosting next semester when a new batch of creative students design cakes. Also don’t miss out on the cake voting at school or on Prospectornow.com.