Baking Cupcakes

• Amy Chen, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2014

It was the first day of school today as a year seven student at a completely new school and my first subject was cooking! I was so nervous because I have never cooked before, not even at home.
In cooking, we were given our first assessment task. We had to bake cupcakes, design them and then write a reflection. Our cooking teacher, Miss Fruit, talked about expectations and gave us a recipe.
“Keep in mind that the cupcakes that you bake will be graded on. You must wash your hands with soap and put your apron on before you start making cupcakes. If you make mistakes, you cannot make it again as it is a waste of ingredients, money and also, five other classes will be making them as well,” she said.
I preheated the oven to 180 degrees Celsius, and then I put in the patty cases into a cupcake pan. I added milk, flour, sugar, butter and two eggs into the bowl. After that, I mixed! Since baking was completely new to me, I have heard that mixing was the best part. I was so excited that I did something extremely careless. I mixed the cupcakes too fast and half of the mix overflowed and dripped onto the table. I crept over to the paper towel dispenser and started wiping the table. But it was too late. Miss Fruit was at her desk and she saw me. She walked over normally and I had a sudden thought that she didn’t see what happened.
“Candy!” she yelled. It was so loud that I jumped while holding the bowl and spilt more of my cupcake mix. “As you have spilt your cupcake mix, you will have a smaller cupcake than the rest of the class. You know the rules.”
A hundred eyes were staring at me. I was so embarrassed that I quickly turned my back to the class, cleaned the spill and went on with mixing. Next, I spooned the mix into the patty cases and baked the cupcakes for 15 minutes. I will absolutely hate cooking!
While the cupcakes were baking in the oven, I started to make my icing. It was definitely easier to make it because all you had to do was put the icing sugar into a bowl, add your food colouring (I chose pink) and water. This time I mixed it all carefully and when the cupcakes were cooled, I piped the pink icing onto the cupcake and added some confectionary on top of it. It actually looked really good, even though it was smaller than the rest of the class, with the pink icing and chocolate chips and crushed blue candy.
"This looks amazing," said Miss Fruit and she smiled at me for the first time today.
In my reflection, I wrote:
Today in Cooking, we made cupcakes. I hated cooking when I spilt the mix, but when I had finished it, I realised that I had a whole heap of fun making it and it was also extremely delicious. I learnt that you shouldn’t jump to conclusions just because you’ve made a careless mistake.