Edible Animal Cells

To wrap up our cell unit Doodle Bug made an edible model of an animal cell.  I spent some time looking for ideas online and found most were made using a cookie or cake of some sorts as the base.  While cookies are okay, the end result looks pretty inedible - not something you're going for when the title of your project is edible animal cell, right?  We knew we wanted something round (because it's a well known fact that all good animal cells are round) and something that could have a lot of components but still taste good.  The final verdict was pizza and what a fine choice it was!  On our pizza cell above (sorry, we only have one picture, Doodle Bug's phone ate the rest) we have

• Crust - cell wall
• Ranch & mozzarella - cytoplasm
• Large Canadian bacon round - nucleus
• Onion round - nucleolus
• Mitochondria - Canadian bacon bits
• Vacuoles - green peppers
• Lysomes - bacon
• Ribosomes - cheddar cheese
• Rough ER - mushrooms with ribs
• Smooth ER - mushrooms without ribs
• Golgi apparatus - onion

Before putting the pizza all together Doodle Bug went over our cell diagrams in our science notebooks to be sure that all of the parts were accounted for.  Just in case you are wondering, no, this pizza does not have red sauce.  Instead we used ranch dressing - it may sound gross but it tastes great.  When I worked at my dad's pizza joint (many moons ago) this was how I made my pizzas.

If you are going to make your own version of this at home, feel free to mix up the pizza toppings.  You can add in some black olives, other colors of bell pepper and some cooked hamburger.  Just as a word of caution - ranch does not taste so good when mixed with pepperoni or sausage (but creamy Italian dressing would work just fine with them).