Celebrating the 115th School

Celebrating the 115th School Birthday

In the cake design industry, it is not uncommon to have to work with clients who have a range of diverse needs, wants and sometimes, totally unreasonable expectations.

The role of the technologist is to manage these expectations with their expertise, ensuring a product that is conceptually creative and still functional. In order to stay in business, the final product must look and taste amazing, be delivered on time, and come in on budget.

As designers-in-training Level 1 food technology students had the opportunity to work with authentic clients from the wider School community to create cakes for the School’s 115th birthday celebrations on 14 June. The design brief allowed them to have experience balancing the competing factors a designer from any discipline would experience in industry. It was all about extending students technically and conceptually while working to a time deadline.

Students needed to consider both the aesthetic and functional aspects of the cake while catering to food allergies and dietary preferences.

Making cakes for authentic clients made the students very aware of deadlines, gave them experience in liaising with and managing client needs, and working with industry software, Menucoster, to ensure raw material costs were managed.

This large-scale project will be assessed in NCEA Level 1 Achievement Standards covering conceptual design and project planning and management. A total of 10 credits, students present a comprehensive portfolio that documents their design journey. Students were delighted with their final cakes and the positive feedback and recognition they received. They all felt that this was a rewarding and fun way to complete an assessment. They especially valued the opportunity to work with real stakeholders.

“I really enjoyed this unit as it was something new and used real-life skills – dealing with a client. I thought it was challenging, as there was pressure to produce a quality cake for the client. I thought it was valuable to work with a real client and serious, in a good way, and helped us understand what dealing with other people can be like and how you need to stick to the brief that your stakeholder gives you.” (Maeve Diver)

Principal, Heather McRae commented: “Year 11 student Sam Huddart had possibly the biggest challenge in meeting with the Executive Team as she discovered that we had a vegan in our midst and took on the task of creating a vegan cake. She was very relieved when she heard that she could use coconut sugar! The cake was a chocolate layered cake with a coffee butter icing and all aspects of the cake were plant based. The decorations included thinly sliced pear dried in a dehydrator, painted green and blue, with gold painting around the edges. They were sweet in flavour and offset the vegan cake beautifully! Thank you, Sam, for the beautiful cake that was enjoyed by our team – and it also felt very healthy!”

With three cakes still in the pipeline for the Old Girls’ League, Parents & Friends of Dio and the Ethics Dinner, we haven’t stopped baking yet. analytical process of design in a variety of contexts through the wider Creative Industries Faculty. Design combines creative and critical thinking and gives students the opportunity to experiment, create, gather feedback, redesign and deliver – the ultimate goal being to improve the quality of the lives we lead.