COP Planning for practice

In the beginning Justine found it difficult just getting the base recipe and a prototype right for the Spoon Biscookie. Initially, once it had been baked, the indentations she had envisaged didn’t show up – there was no definition to it whatsoever. So Justine began studying and getting to know the properties of all the ingredients and how they interact with each other. She visited Crop and Food Research in Christchurch to seek help and advice from food technologists. These people continue to send her a lot of relevant Food Technology information. Justine now creates her own recipes.

The next challenge was developing the machine to produce a consistently shaped spoon. Before approaching an engineer Justine spent a lot of time trialling the product at home. Finally she came up with a concept for a stamping machine.

COP Outcome development and evaluation

Justine designed the machine herself and then approached an engineering company to manufacture it. Combining Justine’s specifications, her knowledge of the dough mixture and the engineers’ knowledge of moulding machinery they were able to work together to produce a machine. Justine would send the engineers dough then they would have to play around with it and then they would bring the machine back to her and then she would play around with it. Finally a manual machine was completed which produced a successful Spoon Biscookie.

The dough goes through a process where you sheet or roll it out and then it is stamped out into trays of 12 spoon-shaped aluminium moulds. This is put underneath a cutting press with all the indentations of the spoon on the top and bottom. As the press comes down, not only is it pressing the dough down but it is also cutting and getting rid of all the excess dough. In order to retain the spoon shape it has to have support while baking and cooling down. If you were to bake it in a mould and take it out to cool it down the shape would flatten.

The two most important factors are to keep a constant baking temperature, and to have the dough mixture of correct consistency, too much fat will make it spread, or too much sugar will make it over cook and make it too hard. Another factor that had to be considered was the number of different thicknesses within the spoon; that during baking, the thinner areas weren’t baked quicker than the thicker areas.

COP Brief development

Another step in the development of the Spoon Biscookie was to produce a formula for a commercial recipe. This, put simply, is putting together two groups of ingredients, accurately weighed, known as premix – Group 1 the liquid ingredients, and Group 2 the dry ingredients. When ready for baking the two sets of premix are blended together forming the dough and then put through the machine to produce the 3D spoon shapes. The Spoon Biscookies are prepared in a commercial mixer with the capacity to make approximately 480 spoons in one batch.