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JPS HR Director Teaches Fletcher Elementary Students To Be Cake Bosses

Pictured, from left and front to back are: Taige Eckwahl, Isabella Blankenship, Julian Himes, Lincoln Carpenter, Jessi Hunter, Gracie Lisciandro, Isabella Smith, Maddox Knorr, Mya Cusimano, Andrew Marucci, Karen Peterson and Sarah Mudge.

Frosting, fondant, chocolate and imagination were all part of a six-week “Cake Boss” course at Fletcher Advantage After School Program. Jamestown Public Schools Human Resources Director, Karen Peterson, volunteered her time to teach the third and fourth-graders how to decorate cakes. This is the second year she has taught the class at Fletcher and has also done one at Love School.

“I absolutely love working with the kids in the cake decorating course,” said Mrs. Peterson. “They are just so excited to learn different techniques. At this age, they are so open to come up with anything and are very creative. I love to volunteer to do this every year, it’s as much, or more, fun for me than it is for the kids.”

The six-week course included: “dissecting” a cake to find out the different components like filling, icing, types of cakes etc., creating a chocolate “flower” with a candy mold, rolling and cutting out fondant with small cookie cutters, working on mini-cakes to learn how to frost a cake properly, creating Mother’s Day cupcakes to take home for their moms and creating all the parts to a final “garden” cake. Mrs. Peterson took the students outside to look at real trees, flowers and other components to a garden so that they could create their imaginary garden cake. They also created a plan through illustrations of what the final cake would look like before they began creating it. They looked at a color wheel to determine what colors were complimentary to each other and talked about correct proportions and measurements when creating a decorated cake.

The students loved creating their masterpieces.

“Cake decorating is my favorite because you get to imagine and do,” said Fletcher Elementary School fourth grader Taige Eckwahl. “I learned that you should always wear gloves, never taste what you are doing and always clean up everything when you decorate a cake.”

A special thanks goes to Fletcher’s Sarah Mudge who assisted Mrs. Peterson in the class. Mrs. Peterson plans to teach the class next year at Fletcher and hopefully expand it to Jefferson Advantage After School Program.

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