Z club fundraisers during Cadenza performances will always be a creative/service experience that all Z club members have. Corresponding to the theme of the performance, Love on the Brain, we decided to sell ice cream with different toppings. Although we wanted to bake red velvet cake to add a bit of red for Valentine’s, we ended up not doing to due to the fact that no one has ever made it before. As a result, I decided that I should try making brownies despite the fact that I have never done so.

Since I just moved, a lot of appliances were not completely set up, so our oven was out of function. To cope with that, I searched for recipes where an alternative way of baking is adopted. The rice steamer is something that almost all Taiwanese households have, and my home isn’t an exception. This resulted in me using the tutorial embedded below.

The video itself was super easy to follow, but I scrolled through the comment section to look for some feedback in order to make sure whether or not I should make some modifications to the recipe. Judging from the comment section and almost every other recipe, the portion of the butter used in the video seemed to be excessive, so I decided to cut the amount of butter added to half of what the video suggested. It seemed to be a reasonable amount since the proportions of the ingredients were then closer to that of what I read in order recipes. Since the ice cream will be sweet for sure, I also decided to cut down the amount of sugar added by 1/3 so that the brownie would go along with the ice cream better. One of the pros of using a steamer was that it wasn’t necessary to keep an eye on the time since it has a built-in timer that stops steaming when the food is cooked (although I am not quite sure the theory behind that). Anyway, although I was not sure why my brownie turned out way darker than expected, I was glad to hear that people loved it.

 

Besides the brownies, I was able to engage in this service experience creatively by creating a poster for the fundraiser, which was my job as the art director for Z club. I decided to use different fonts for my poster, including my signature brush-lettering font. Something different about this poster was the fact that I added components with the color pencil to add some warmth and handcraft vibes.