Special Baking
Sinead Timmins
Tararua College
Year 11 Food Technology, 14 week project
Teacher: Diana Eagle
The class was given a context in which to develop their project called Special Baking. Sinead decided to use her sister as a stakeholder, because she is one of the chefs at the local Black Stump Café. This is a fully licensed restaurant but Sinead decided to look at the cabinet products the café also makes, which are sold throughout the day.
With the support of management and the other chef, Sinead's task was to look at developing a savoury rice recipe that was reheatable, easy to prepare and freeze ready for use, and which would look appealing to the customers who come in for a quick bite rather than waiting for something from the menu.
Sinead used good stakeholder feedback and planning skills to develop a variety of ideas. The chefs were so impressed with her ideas that they chose most of these. This resulted in her making a simple recipe book suited for use by the chefs on a daily basis. The book consists of three pastries which she developed to be frozen and reheated later. Sinead performed storage and reheating tests on these.
One of her innovations was to use a set of turnover pastry shapers which the chefs decided they would purchase to use themselves in the café.
Sinead also created seven different pizza toppings which reflected the café's choice of ingredients and flavour style. The bases for these were trialled – frozen and reheated to choose the best. The chefs chose the basic pastry base over a polenta and yeast base for its ease of preparation and freezing qualities.
Teacher comment
Sinead's project showed good technology with the way she developed the products to specifically meet the requirements of her stakeholders. She was able to perform meaningful testing in her product development which furthered her project. She used feedback from her stakeholders to make key decisions on what her next task would need to be. Sinead demonstrated that constraints andrequirements imposed on product development by the stakeholder do not diminish the ability to be creative and innovative.
Sinead found that although having an authentic stakeholder gave her project a sense of reality she did find it difficult to get the information she needed from her 
stakeholders, whether positive or negative feedback – "I enjoyed developing the products, but I could have gone on forever". It is important for teachers to prepare students in how to communicate and gain meaningful feedback on their ideas.
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