The Great pancake experiment of '09

Jacob has to do a science fair project this year for his new school. The teacher sent home a packet that outlined how he was to proceed in choosing a topic. She did NOT want him going to the library and checking out "101 science experiments for kids", which is exactly what I would have done...

He was supposed to go through this whole process of identifying the subjects he was interested in which were

1. medieval warfare

2. Baseball

3. cooking: more specifically, cooking pancakes

I wasn't quite sure how we were going to build several sets of armor of various thickness and metal types and check their durability against arrows, lances, maces, battle axes and broadswords.....

I did think there was some merit to seeing which kind of bat gave you an edge in distance hitting in baseball; metal or wood.

But I was greatly relieved when he decided that he wanted to see how the size or absence of eggs in pancake batter would affect the finished product.

That sounded like something I could easily help with.

We made 4 batters: no egg, small eggs, large eggs (the regular recipe) and extra large eggs

We mixed and measured very carefully

We measured batter thickness, ease of pouring...

As you might expect, the no egg batter was very thick and clumpy and not so easy to pour.

It made the ugliest pancakes

oddly enough, the small egg pancakes seemed to be the most popular. We could find VERY little difference between the batters and pancakes from the large and extra large eggs. They were almost exactly the same.

Now we just have to chart our findings and decorate a tri-fold board for the science fair.... I think that will be more work than the actual experiment.