For NEA 1 you need to evaluate and annotate your results. Here’s how to do it using the Nutrition Program.

Use Food Science You Can Eat to help – available again mid Sept 2023 – contact Jenny directly to buy a copy.

The Task – To discover what happens if you reduce the sugar in a sponge cake recipe.

We made cakes with full amount of 60g sugar and then did a batch with 50g, 40g, 30g.

You can evaluate the Functional properties of sugar in cakes – the purpose for which the ingredient is being used and can be linked to –  its structure, nutritional value, taste, texture, appearance, shelf life.

How to do this

1. Create a recipe for your sponge cake in My Recipes.
2. Bake and compare your cakes and then click Star Profile
3. Name the recipe ‘Star profile sponge cakes’.
4. Choose descriptors – how the cake should look and taste. The descriptors we chose were – golden, yellow sponge, open texture, moist, dry.
5. The Control cake was marked golden (5), yellow sponge (4), open texture (4), moist (4), dry (1) – this was our perfect cake.
6. Taste the cakes and mark them on the chart – tip in the +Add Taster put the name of the cake – for example, full sugar, 50g sugar.
7. The Nutrition Program Star Profile fills in – now you need to Evaluate the results under Evaluation – see our chart.
8. To get extra exam marks you can annotate the Star profile.

This shows an example of annotating a Star Profile to show what the results mean.

Task

Compare the nutrition of sweeteners for cakes and desserts – use for experiments changing the types of sweetener used in cakes and desserts.

We are told to reduce the amount of ‘free sugars’ in our food, especially cakes and desserts.

But how easy is this to do and how much sugar is found in ingredients used for sweetening?

Compare the sugar content of different ingredients

To do

Use the Nutrition Program for this investigation.

Click My Recipes, +New Recipe and call it Sugar Investigation.

You want to find ingredients that you can use to sweeten cakes and the amount of sugar they contain in 100g

Find Ingredient

Type sugar and see the list. Tip – put a comma after sugar, then more appear. Some are lower sugar products.

Also choose fruits and vegetables which can be used to sweeten such as prunes and figs.

My choice

Sugar

Sugar, half spoon

Hermesetas, granulated sweetener

Banana

These are the results from the Nutrition Program

Sweetening ingredient	Sugar in 100g
Sugar	105 g
Sugar, half spoon	99 g
Hermesetas, granulated sweetener	14 g
Banana	21 g

For Investigations, you need to make the cakes and find out how the results look and taste.

Then you can decide which sweeteners are the best.