, 13 January 2016
Feel like a biscuit? This recipe will make exactly one tasty piece of shortbread.
Safety: Use clean hands and equipment. This activity requires a hot oven. Ask an adult for help.
First aid: If you burn yourself, run the burn under cold water for 20 minutes.
It takes a lot of work to make one piece of shortbread with this recipe. However, if you want to make more than one, you don’t need to make them one at a time. If you work out how many pieces you want, you can multiply the quantity of each ingredient and make a recipe for exactly the right number of biscuits for you. That way, you’ll only need to measure and mix once.
When you’re multiplying this recipe, you’ll have to be a bit careful. You need to multiply each of the ingredients, but you don’t need to multiply all the other numbers in the recipe. If you were making 10 pieces of shortbread, you wouldn’t need 10 bowls, and you certainly wouldn’t want to bake them at 1500°C. However, you might need a second baking tray, and the shortbread might take a few minutes longer to cook.
Food companies are very interested in scaling up recipes. When they come up with a new recipe, they first make it in small batches in a laboratory. If the recipe is promising, then they will scale it up to be made in their factory. Whenever a new recipe is scaled up, food scientists have to run tests. Sometimes when a recipe is scaled up, some costs increase a lot, and a recipe that looked good in the lab is too expensive to produce in the factory.
An example of scaling up a cake recipe
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17 August, 2021 at 11:33 am
Why is the measurement of some solid ingredients (sugar, flour) in mL?
17 August, 2021 at 12:00 pm
Hi Don,
This activity was written in 2011, back when electronic scales were less common. Even now, many people don’t have scales that could measure, say 6 grams of rice flour, but measuring spoons or the measuring cups you use for cough syrup are pretty good for the task.
If we were top do this activity again, we would probably include both volume and mass measurements