How to Make an Edible Plant Cell Project for School

Making an edible plant cell project might sound like a time consuming project to take on at first, but they are easy to make.  It’s also a fun way to learn the parts of a plant.  My son had to make this edible plant cell for a classroom project in science and he kindly let me know on a Tuesday that this was due on Friday!  YIKES!  I’ll admit I panicked a little.

I’m a working mom with a LOT going on this month with reading fairs and book fairs, so adding a science project in the mix was almost enough to send me over the edge.  However, thanks to the internet, we were able to get some great ideas for making edible plant cell projects and it turns out, there really wasn’t anything to get worked up over.

Edible Plant Cell Project

If you decide to go the cake route for making an edible plant cell, you may as well buy your favorite flavor of cake and icing, because chances are, you’re going to be bringing a lot of this cake home.  We’re partial to chocolate cakes with fluffy white frosting, so a trip to Dollar General was all we needed to get the necessary cake mix, frosting, and candy to decorate with.  We also bought a disposable pan to use for this in case the cake didn’t make it back home.  It’s easier to transport than a heavy cake pan and no clean up afterward!

I mixed the cake up and put it in the oven to bake.  While that was baking, I made some little flags to identify each part of the plant cell.  I just typed these up and printed them out, then wrapped them around tooth picks.  This was probably the most tedious part of the whole edible plant cell project.  If we would have had more time, I would have ordered these awesome little food flags to use.

Plant Cell Parts

Once the cake was finished and cooled, I frosted it and then my son was able to start decorating it like a plant cell.  This is the candy and food items he used to decorate each part:

Nucleus/Nuclear wall/nuclear envelope- Hostess Sno-Ball with a jelly bean in the middle for the nucleus

Cell wall- small colored marshmallows

Cell membrane-  yellow decorator icing

Vacuole- Blue decorator icing

Mitochondria-  Fruit Gushers

Endoplasmic Reticulum- sour gummy worms

Golgi apparatus- Fruit by the Foot

Cytoplasm- Cake frosting

Chloroplast- green sprinkles

Lysosomes- jelly beans

He was pretty pleased with how it turned out and he ended up getting an A for the edible plant cell project itself and another A for his presentation of it.  I never would have came up with an idea like this, and I have to admit it was a fun project to do together and it really helped him learn the parts of a plant.  There are so many different variations of this edible plant cell project online…I’ve seen them with gelatin, pizzas, and other ideas.  I guess it just depends on how much time you can put into it.  The cake was quick and easy for us.