Yr 10 Food-Animal Aid Guest Speaker

At the beginning of the summer term the Year 10 GCSE Food Preparation & Nutrition class invited in a speaker from Animal Aid to deliver a lesson on Animal Welfare. As part of their GCSE Controlled Assessment, it is important students have a good understanding the nutritional needs of different groups of people such as vegan;, people who suffer from allergies; and also of people in different life stages. Some really thought-provoking debates occurred as a result of the presentation by the speaker: some were against eating meat, fish and animal products, their reasons touched on areas such as ethics, religion and climate change.

To round the visit off, Sophie (our Animal Aid visitor) set a challenge: to make a batch of vegan chocolate brownies. This meant that the class were unable to use eggs in their mixture, an extremely important ingredient for giving lift and structure to the cake. One batch substituted the egg with banana, one with flax seed and the other with four tablespoons of chickpea water.

There were very mixed opinions about which brownies were preferred, although all recipes worked very well, however, the clear winner for the class was the banana!

For anybody interested please try out the recipe:

• egg alternative, either 1 tbsp flaxseed mixed with 3 tbsp water

OR 1 1/2 very ripe bananas mashed to a smooth paste

OR 4 tbsp chickpea water

• 60g cocoa powder
• 300g caster sugar
• 100g brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 100ml soya or rice milk
• 280ml rapeseed oil
• 1 tbsp vanilla essence or extract
• 150g dairy free chocolate chips or a bar broken into pieces

Grease and line a brownie tin and preheat the oven to 180°c.
In a big bowl, mix together the flour, cocoa, caster sugar, brown sugar, baking powder and salt. Once combined, add in 120ml water, the milk, oil, vanilla and egg alternative. Spoon into the tin and sprinkle with the chocolate chips. Feel free to add nuts too!
Bake for about 20 mins. (These brownies are meant to be gooey, so resist the urge to leave them in for longer.) Remove from the oven and cool on a wire rack before cutting into squares.

Enjoy!

Important Exam Information for Students 2018