- Main
Can you make cookies without an egg? Or with half an egg? How about only a yolk? Or just a white?
Most seasoned bakers wouldn’t risk changing a favorite recipe, but that is exactly what was ordered for science class heading into holiday break: Predict what will happen if an ingredient in a cookie recipe is altered. See the class in action.
“We wanted to think of a different way of looking at chemistry,” said Betsy Cunningham P ’22, ’24, a member of the science faculty. “It’s about sparking their curiosity. Once you spark their curiosity, then they’re a little more invested in what they’re doing.”
For the baking experiment, students used the scientific method as they explored the effect of changing one variable in a recipe.
“I think that baking is a lot like a science lab in general, because you have to follow a recipe, which is like a procedure, and there’s also lots of chemistry happening in baking,” said Cory Bontrager, a science faculty member. “So, if you use an egg, for example, what is the role of that egg in the chemical reaction? When you’re baking a cake or a cookie, what chemical reactions are happening?”
Adi Rinker ’27, who decided to eliminate egg yolks from her test cookies, built her hypothesis on what she knew.
“Egg whites and sugar can be used for meringue,” said Rinker, of Chambersburg, PA. “And meringues are very light and airy, so we’re hoping it’ll have the same effect on cookies if we beat the egg whites a little bit.”
Another student thought it might be interesting to eliminate the eggs altogether.
“We took eggs out of our cookie, because we wanted to see what would happen if you had a batch of cookies with no eggs and no protein to hold it together,” said Elizabeth Young ’26.
While the results were varied, the desired outcome was achieved, as the students learned scientific principles through hands-on learning, which was much more appealing than a class that primarily focused on the periodic table, noted Robby Kidd ’27 of Leesburg, VA.
Project-based learning helps students retain information, Cunningham said. “They care more. They work harder, because they have something invested. If I’m standing at the front of the class, they might get the same content, but the retention doesn’t happen as much because they don’t have a relationship with what’s going on.”
Plus, they ate cookies and shared results with classmates and class visitors.
“This is the inside of one without eggs,” Young said, while asking classmate Alle Garza ’27 to show their control, which was noticeably thicker. “That one has eggs, and there’s a difference.”
After the cookies were baked, the students saved two types of samples–cookies baked while following the recipe and cookies baked after changing one variable. These were taken to the science lab for analysis. The students weighed, measured, and made observations, comparing both the control and the variable.
“It’s a lot of trial and error, seeing whether their data supports their hypothesis or whether their data doesn’t support their hypothesis, both being OK. Data is data,” said Cunningham.
The students wrote a two-page analysis and prepared a presentation to share their findings.
The project has proven to be popular.
“This is their favorite unit of any of the units that we do in chemistry,” Cunningham said. “This is the third year we’ve been teaching this unit, and they love it. In reviews, they look back on this unit and say how much they enjoy this, because one, they get to eat the cookies. Two, they learn something that they didn’t think they would learn: It’s a little bit of a surprise to them that baking is chemistry. And three, they enjoy being in the café, where they get to do the baking. They’re able to make some parallels in their lives about science, about baking down the road.”