Last week our class finished one of our biggest projects of the year called the blue sky project, these projects we do twice a year and are very open ended projects being based off a inquiry question. This year the project was based off of solving a problem that either babies, children, Tweens, elders, and pets faced. At first I found it quite difficult to come up with a problem that one of these groups faced but after talking to my family my dad said that one problem that babies at his allergy office faced was not having a peanut snack that could be introduced to babies at young ages. So I decided to create a peanut baby biscuit to reduce the risk of peanut allergies. Currently 1 in 50 Canadian children have peanut allergies.
The inquiry question I tackled was “HMW create a healthy and beneficial snack that reducing the risks of peanut allergies?” This question lead my curiosity and sparked my ideas for how I would be answering this question to help reduce the risk of allergies. To answer this question I went through a lot of research, making many prototypes and testing.
Throughout the next stage of the project, I undertook a lot of research needed to try and find the solution to the peanut allergy problem. I started off by researching peanut allergies and the severity of these allergies. As well, how the introduction of peanuts to babies will reduce the risk of developing allergies and prevent them for when they are older. For my research about the allergy I received some information from my dad and one of his colleague’s presentation about how peanut allergies affects children. After doing a lot of research on the actual peanut allergy, I also researched different recipes for baby snacks, including crackers, biscuits, baby rusks and soft foods to find the best options for this snack. Within this snack, I also researched the specific amount of peanut needed in the snack and created an intriguing package for the suggested customer range of this project. This Blue Sky project will challenge me to create a healthy and beneficial peanut snack that will reduce the risk of peanut allergies as well as use advertising techniques we learned last year.
This link is to one of the articles I used.
After researching a lot on both the peanut allergies and possible snacks for babies, I decided on making a baby biscuit. I chose a baby teething biscuit instead of other baby foods or snacks for many reasons including it being easier to incorporate the peanut amount into a biscuit. Also, currently on the market, there are no peanut baby biscuits for parents to buy for their infants. During the research stages of my project, I looked up many different recipes and ingredients used in well known on the shelf baby cookies such as Mum Mum cookies. Baby Mum Mum cookies are made with pear juice, potato starch and rice flour. When trying to research these specific cookies, not a lot of recipes came up, especially regarding these ones. The research of recipes and ingredients lead me to creating my prototypes.
This is a baby mum mum cookie
At first, I thought it would be quite easy to just create a biscuit. However, as I started creating the first few prototypes, this project turned out to be quite challenging to bake a delicious cookie that babies would like to eat.Throughout these prototypes, I tried many different combinations of ingredients including different flours like rice flour, oat flour and baby cereal as bases. I also tried different starches such as arrowroot and potato starch. With each new combination, I tried different proportions as well as observing whether there was a difference with cooking the biscuits at a higher temperature for a shorter amount of time or a lower temperature for a longer amount of time. With many of these baby biscuit prototypes, my main problem was primarily the consistency with them being most commonly rock hard on the outside and raw on the inside. This was very frustrating at times with continuous unsuccessful attempts but I continued slightly changing the biscuits or trying a new combination completely. The cookie towards the final few prototypes started to come together with a consistency that was an easily edible baby food. One thing that helped with the creation of the biscuits was putting the dough in the fridge for 10-15 minutes to make it easier to roll out and put it in the oven. The process was very similar for the next 20 prototypes, making either slight adjustments or drastically changing the biscuit to try something with different ingredients, cooking temperature or time of all of the above. The most important part of prototyping throughout my project was to just continuously test and revise drafts to come up with a final product. During the process of creating this biscuit, I also consulted with someone who has created an allergy candy for children about some suggestions including different ingredients to use such as different starches and flours and different cooking techniques.
Here are some of the prototypes I created:
When I made my final draft, it was definitely better than my previous ones but it still would need some changes if I was to further improve my project. The ingredients for this prototype included rice flour, apple juice, bananas, coconut oil and baby cereal. I used many of these ingredients to reduce the amount of added sugar to as little as possible using only natural sugar and organic materials. I found out while making this biscuit in actuality it was quite hard to create a puffy yet melt in your mouth cookie. Most of the store bought baby biscuits are mass produced as well as processed with huge machines that can make a consistency that is good for babies. The biscuit I made has no added sugar and is made up of simple ingredients to ensure the babies like the cookies and the taste isn’t too strong for their taste buds. Over the course of making over 20 prototypes I think the final one definitely had major improvements. On top of making the biscuits, I also created a poster explaining the different factors that went into creating this snack which I would be showing off at the Blue Sky exhibition. As well, I showed the many ingredients I used to create the cookie.
This is my poster board
Final prototypes of biscuit
I think that my overall project including the prototypes, presentation and research was an interesting and fun experience to create. I learned many skills I can use for future projects as well as had fun creating this biscuit.