How to Make an Animal & Plant Cell Model With a Cake

Why make an ordinary cake like this one when you can make a cell model cake?

Learning about plant and animal cells is fundamental to science courses, from elementary all the way to doctoral studies. For most, the creation of a cell model for a class is a labor without profit. Shortly after the presentation, the cell becomes a dust collector on the top shelf of a closet or makes a quick trip to the trash. If you're been assigned to make a plant or animal cell model--or just want a project to educate your children while giving them a treat for their academic pursuits--consider making a tasty, instructional cell model out of cake.

Things You'll Need

• 9x13 sheet cake
• White frosting
• Food coloring
• Large jawbreaker
• Gummy worms
• Peppermints
• Sixlets
• Pull & Peel Twizzlers
• Black licorice
• Licorice bites
• Candy spearmint leaves
• Toothpick
• Label maker

Instructions

1. Mix some of the frosting with a few drops of red food coloring to make pink for an animal cell--or with a few drops of green for a plant cell--and frost the top of the cake. Frost the sides of the cake to represent the cell wall.

2. Mix a few drops of red and blue food coloring with the frosting to make it purple or blackish. On the plant cell, paint a large portion (approximately two-thirds) of the cake with the frosting. For the animal cell, you only need only one or two spots of approximately 2 inches. These create the vacuole.

3. Drip a few drops of food coloring on the jawbreaker to represent the nucleolus. Put the jawbreaker on the top of the cake to represent the nucleus.

4. Make the Golgi apparatus by trimming the gummy worms to different sizes and arranging them on the cake so they are in a pyramid shape.

5. Place a few peppermints on the top of the cake to resemble mitochondria.

6. Sort the Sixlets by color. Choose three colors and make three piles of four or five Sixlets each to make the lysosomes, peroxisomes and secretory vesicles.

7. Separate the Pull & Peel Twizzlers to form strands. Place these around the edge of the cake to create loops of microfilaments.

8. Represent the rough endoplasmic reticulum with two sets of five black licorice bites around the nucleus.

9. Place two licorice bites on the cake as centrosome.

10. Place four candy spearmint leaves around the edge of the cake for a plant cell to represent the chloroplast.

11. Print out each of the cell components twice on your label maker. Wrap the labels around the tops of the toothpicks. Insert the toothpicks near the appropriate cell parts.

Tips & Warnings

• You can use different candies to represent the cell parts, or use frosting and a piping bag to make parts out of frosting.

References

• Cells Alive: Eucaryotic Cell Organelles
• University of Utah: Inside a Cell