World Cake

Homeschool is fun for a lot of reasons.  But one thing I really love is the surprise activities I randomly find mixed into our curriculum!  At the end of week two, our fine arts assignment was to bake and decorate a world cake.  It was tempting to skip it as I thought through all the work of baking a cake from scratch (no cake mixes out here) and making our own icing (which involves sifting down the super-chunky "powdered" sugar and using precious butter).  Not to mention the fact that we've cut down our sweets quite a bit, and having a cake around is just too tempting!  But I figured out a work-around for that, too. (see below) 

And honestly, I just love making edible art.  My Grandma taught me most of what I know, and the rest I've just experimented with on my own.  She sometimes struggled with a shaky hand, so as a teenager I remember going over to help her with the text... I loved those special times with Grandma! 

Micaiah chose white-on-white, our family's favorite.  One twist is that we love to add almond extract to the icing.  Growing up, I was convinced that all good icing tasted like my Grandma's, which had a heavy almond flavor.  To this day, if you tell me otherwise, I won't believe you.  Almond is the best with white cake.  Period. 

Anyway, back to our cake day...

Micaiah did all the measuring and mixing

 The cake fresh out of the oven. My original plan was do bake the cake in a bowl so we had a hemisphere to work with, but the bowl I wanted to use was cracked and the only other one I have that size is plastic.  Plus, then we'd have to decide which hemisphere is the best---North? South? East? West?  We live in the South/East but are originally from the North/West... we wouldn't want to have to choose.  So it worked out in the end.  We decided to go for a flat map, modeling it after the one in our atlas.  In retrospect we could have trimmed the top and bottom to make it closer to the right shape for this type of map, but it's only second grade...

Sorry there aren't more process pictures.  We were both consumed with the task, I suppose!  First I free-handed the outlines of all seven continents (as we reviewed them).  Micaiah wanted to fill in the continents, which is admittedly much more fun.  We did the same with the five oceans as we reviewed them. 

The final result... we did pretty well, I think!  Plus it accomplished its purpose of helping us review the continents oceans. 

 And then just for fun, we attempted a population map. Totally not accurate, but a GREAT excuse to add sprinkles!  And the oceans got blue sprinkles to help them be physical maps (showing depth)... much easier to remember the different types of maps when you have sprinkles to help you!  And no, I wasn't even going to ATTEMPT a political map!!

It tasted great!  mmmm... almond butter-cream icing.... :)  And to avoid eating it all in one sitting, after we had each had a small slice, we cut the rest into individual servings.  We separated them with small pieces of waxed paper, wrapped the whole thing up in waxed paper and plastic wrap, and popped in the freezer.  Done.  Not staring me in the face, and we could pull it out a piece or two at a time as a treat.

Not a bad way to review maps, continents, and oceans, is it?

-JLR