In-depth Post #6
Hello, I’m Amin, and welcome to my final in-depth blog post of the year (Already!) Please press the see original button to see the photos I have added. This is my final progress report!
In these two weeks, I’ve learned to make another family-favourite bakery item: Chocolate Banana muffins. My mentor and I were contemplating when I should start making my own recipe, but my mentor told me that “it would probably be better if [I] try making a new type of bakery item, as for now, [I] only tried making brownies, cookies, and cakes, and cupcakes”. That is how we decided that I would make a muffin for our next meeting. My mentor, Rie, told me to look for muffin recipes I wanted to try until out next meeting, so I got to work. After looking at dozens of websites and blogs, I found the perfect chocolate-banana muffin recipe. It was from a website called The Baking ChocolaTess. The link should be right under this paragraph, I would recommend this recipe to any bakers out there, as the recipe is very simple, and the results are spectacular (not to forget, tasty too!). While making the dough, a piece of advice I found was important was that “even if [I were] using butter, if [I] want[ed] to make [my] muffins moist and soft, [I needed to] use some light oil such as sunflower seed oil”. Luckily, I had sunflower seed oil, and added to the dough. I’m glad I listened to her, as I think that was what made my muffins so soft and nice textured!
Below are the photos I took during the process of making the chocolate banana muffins.
Mixing the ingredients!
Stir, stir, stir!
Before leaving them in the oven. I wonder how they will look when I take them out?
Finished results! The muffins are baked perfectly!
Inside the muffin!
As you can see the results of the muffins were fabulous. My mentor told me that “they look delicious”, and let me tell you, it wasn’t only the looks. These were the best tasting bakery item I have ever made, and everybody in my family agreed. I hope to make these chocolate banana muffin as often as I can. To summarize all my in-depth posts, I have learned to make cookies, roll cakes, brownies, cupcakes, and muffins.
Learning Centre
For my learning centre, I am hoping to make my own recipe on muffins. I will try to get the least amount of help as I can from my mentor, as I want my learning centre to reflect on how much I have learned throughout in-depth. Also, I will be making some sort of collage with pictures of all the bakery foods I have made till now. I will be making the collage online, using a website called canva that my mentor recommended to me.
How To Have A Beautiful Mind
This week, the two chapters covered from Edward de Bono’s How to Have a Beautiful Mind are Concepts and Alternatives.
Concepts are the general idea, or umbrella term, used to cover more specific items. For example, “food” is a concept, because there are specific types of food such as cookies, cakes, and more. As well, “bakery items” would be a concept, just a smaller one. There are several types of concepts, and several levels of specificity.
Alternatives are other ways of completing tasks. There are positive, negative, and many other types of alternatives. For example, if you are making a choice as what to bake, there are choices such as muffins, cupcakes, and brownies you can choose from.
An example of when a concept was used in a meeting was when my mentor and I were making the dough for the chocolate banana muffins. She was explaining to me why the melted butter should be cooled off before putting in the dough. She said, “when at room temperature, butter form an emulsion which traps air, and while baking in the oven, that trapped air expands and produces a fluffy muffin”. In this example, the concept is bakery items. The dough and butter can be called practical ideas, which are specific items under a concept.
An example of when alternatives were used during a meeting was also when I was making the chocolate banana muffin dough. Rie, my mentor, gave me the option of doubling the amount of chocolate chips I would put into the dough. She said, “If you want, you can use double the amount of chocolate chips as the recipe tells you to add only a small amount, in my opinion”. I took the alternative of doubling the amount of chocolate chips. I am a huge chocolate fan, I and I decided that more chocolate will be better than having less. Also, another time I used alternatives during the meeting was when she recommended to use sunflower oil in my dough, even though the recipe didn’t mention it. As I stated above, I think I made a good choice, as it really made my muffins top-notch.
Final Last Words
First, I want to thank my mentor for everything she did during the past twelve weeks. My mentor, Rie, never canceled any meetings, even with her busy schedule. I enjoyed every bit of our meetings, such as when she taught me new techniques, gave advice, helped decide what I would bake next, and the overall “baking” part I did every meeting. We would also talk about things that were happing in our lives, and she gave some great advice then too. I cannot believe that in-depth is ending soon, and the fact that I will be graduating from TALONS in a few months. Time flies! Meet you at my learning centre soon!
Thanks for reading till now! See you soon!