The Incredible Edible Cell

My son came home the weekend before Winter Break with information on how to complete a project that was worth 40% of his grade. This was on a Friday and the project was due on a Monday. Now normally I would complain about not receiving advanced notice from my children about such a thing but the paper was dated on Friday.

The teacher gave NO NOTICE!

This is a pet peeve of mine. We live paycheck to paycheck... well we did when we were working. Now we have no income and a giant project due on Monday. The school is aware of our circumstances yet no help with this project was given. Sigh... 

To further irritate me, he was given a rubric with little to no information on what to do and was given the advice to google for help. So I googled. I found a lot of information on the Incredible Edible Cell Project. This site is particular good for information on cells.

We were also told no jello. 

Most edible cells are made out of jello. 

Alternatives I found were a cake and a pizza. Since he got extra credit for creativity, we came up with the idea of a cookie and a pie as well. We went with a pie.

How to make...

Using the site I gave you above we had a pretty good idea of how to put the pie together. We filled the pie crust with chocolate pudding. Then we used a melon-baller to make just the right size in the orange to insert the peanut butter cup. Then we stuck the nucleus (orange) into our pudding pie. We surrounded it with the other items and finally labeled it with toothpicks.

WALA... one edible cell!

The pictures make a backwards L in the order in which we added the items so you can kinda see step-by-step what we did. For the tooth-pick labels I cut strips out of index cards, folded the strips in half, and the stuck the toothpick in gluing the two sides together. 

What we used... 

Cell membrane = Graham Cracker Crust 

Nucleus = Inside of the Orange 

Nucleolus = Reese Mini PB Cup 

Nuclear Membrane = Orange Peel

Cytoplasm = Chocolate Pudding 

Smooth E.R. = Gummy Worms 

Rough E.R. = Sour Gummy Worms 

Golgi Bodies = Blue Laffy Taffy

Ribosomes = Candy Sprinkles

Mitochondrion = Twix

Vacuoles = Chocolate Chips

Lysosomes = Orange M&M’s

Centrosomes = Marshmallow 

Cost: about $50! 

And I already had some of the ingredients on hand (sprinkles, chocolate chips. marshmallows, and M&M's). I also bought as much as I could from Dollar Tree (Twix, Gummy Worms, & Sour Gummy Worms). Sigh...

Cute... fun... expensive project 

and yep... 

He got an A!