3rd Grade: Wayne Thiebaud Cake Drawings

Hopefully I'm going to be playing catch-up these next few days!  I've got SO MANY projects to share from before the winter break, it's not even funny!  Things have been insanely hectic with the holidays, conferences, and committees at school.  I also recently became a consultant for Jamberry in order to help pay medical bills from last year.  My blog has unfortunately taken a back seat to all of these things, but it's my goal to make sure that stops happening!

This next project I'm going to share is probably one you've seen on Pinterest.  My students in 3rd grade LOVED making these oil pastel Wayne Thiebaud cakes!  (Did you know his last name is pronounced "tee-bow"?  Like the football player?  I didn't until I presented this project!).  This is the first time I've used this artist as a reference in my classes, and the students just loved it.  I find that they always love oil pastels anyways, because it's so easy for them to be successful with color blending and value, but the added fact that they were designing cakes like the Cake Boss just made it even cooler!

I am in LOVE with this one!  There is a local, elementary art show coming up and I wasn't sure if I'd have four pieces to send to it, but I do believe that this one may be going! :)

This project even correlates with Common Core math, as students were turning basic shapes into 3-D forms.  We used vocabulary such as cylinders and cubes to describe the shapes of our cake tiers.  Students practiced drawing their cakes on a worksheet for the first day.  Then, they drew them on 12"x18" black paper the second day, and I demonstrated how to blend the colors together on the cake tiers, adding in a little black for shadows.  On the third day, students finished their tiers and colored the background, finishing them up!

Mondrian Cakes

We finally tackled the Mondrian cakes the week of Memorial Day weekend.  You can see my post here about the bakery that makes artist inspired cakes, which then inspired this baking project with my 12:1:1 class!

This is my cake.  After we finished frosting them, I cut mine open so the students could see what their's would look like.  We wanted them to take the cakes home to share with their family so they weren't allowed to eat all that sugar at school!

On the first day, we split the kids into three groups and they mixed three cake batters.  We practiced measuring liquids with a glass measuring cup and they even had to wash their own dishes!  We split the batter into four bowls and baked a white, red, blue and yellow cake.  After they cooled, I cut the cakes into squares and rectangles, and put them in the freezer for frosting two days later.

On the second day, I showed them step-by-step how we were going to assemble the cake.  After all the pieces were "glued" together with frosting, they frosted the outside to hide the colors on the inside!

The students really enjoyed this project and it was a good project to just teach some basic kitchen skills!  Unfortuntely on assembly day, there were two students who had to sit out.  One refused to wash his hands and under his fingernails and the other kept licking the frosting off the knife!  They were all told no licking hands, fingers or knives until we were done!  Then, anything that was on their fingers was fair game, and that was it!

Mondrian Inspiration...

This morning a colleague sent me this link on my Facebook: "Modern Art Desserts: How to Bake Mondrian in Your Oven."  Upon reading the link, I found myself at the actual website for this "art" and I was inspired!

The Blue Bottle Cafe creates and sells these awesome recreations of famous artworks that are shown in the San Francisco MOMA.  The desserts are constantly changing based on the current artworks.  If you go to the website, you can check out the story behind the Cafe, as well as the awesome desserts they serve!

Now, the person who sent me this link is an aide that comes with the 12:1:1 class that I teach, comprised of Kindergarten to third graders.  There are a variety of students in the class...students with Down Syndrome, social disorders, extreme Autism, among a few other learning disabilities.  Lately, the aide and I have been discussing the kinds of projects students could do in art class that they could carry out at home instead of video games.  It seems during discussion and interaction in their regular classroom, most of the students only talk about their video games.  

I decided that we could try a sewing unit.  Next class we'll start off by doing some basket weaving using some leftovers from a Roylco Basket Weaving Kit I purchased for the Extended Day program.  Depending on how things go, we'll move onto sewing on burlap with yarn and buttons.

After that (and hopefully after all of my food aversions and morning sickness are over), I want to do a Mondrian inspired cake with the students!  Over the summer, I made a rainbow cake with the Extended Day program, so I'm thinking that this probably won't be too difficult.  It will be good for the students to learn how to read a recipe (we'll probably use 2-3 boxed cakes) and to learn a little about baking as well!

Since there are two aides that come with the class, I think we may split the 9 students that come into three groups and each of the adults will work with each group to bake a cake.  We mix three batters and then split the batter into four portions.  One will remain white, and the other two will be dyed red, yellow and blue.  I'll bake them in 9" square pans (or loaf pans, I'm undecided) and then the next class, we will frost them together (I think that I will cut them up into squares and rectangles beforehand, of course).  

Hopefully we'll have enough cake made to make little individual cakes so that each student can actually take their cake home with them!  

Gosh, I'm really excited about this idea...I can't wait to get through the next two lessons and onto the baking aspect!

Rainbow Cake!

Today was a major food day during our summer program!  Yesterday the kids prepared a lasagna from scratch and baked it today.  They also made a salad and we made a rainbow cake!  Yup, that same rainbow cake that has been floating around Pinterest!

I've made this cake on my own from scratch before following one of the numerous recipes I found on-line, but we simplified it a little bit for the kids to make and just used boxed cake.  We mixed two boxes of cake according to the instructions, and then split it into six separate bowls...it ended up being about 1 1/2 cups of batter per bowl.  We mixed in some gel food coloring and then baked each small cake for about 10-12 minutes in 9" round cake pans.

 After the cakes cooled, we started from the bottom of the rainbow and worked out way up!  Purple cake, a thing layer of frosting, blue cake, frosting, green cake...you get the idea!  After they were all stacked, I frosted the entire outside of the cake with plain white frosting.  It's so cool when you cut into it to see the colored cake!  After we had our lasagna lunch we cut into the cake!  Needless to say we spent time out on the playground for everyone to run off their sugar high!

Definitely kid approved!

If you decide to bake this cake, my only suggestion would be to make sure you use all the same types of pans while baking the separate cakes.  We used two regular round cake pans and two spring-form pans.  You can see from the layers that the cakes we baked in the spring-form pans were thinner on the edges and thicker in the middle, which made stacking the cake a little difficult.  I'm definitely not the Cake Boss so I didn't want to attempt to cut the layers even!