- Are you curious about careers in science?

Hi, I'm Genesis and today I'm here with Nikki Thompson Frazier.

Nikki, can you tell me where you are and what you do?

- I own Sweet Encounter Bakery located here in Lansing, Michigan.

I love baking and my kids love treats just like I'm sure you love treats, Genesis, but some of the treats don't always love them back because they have food allergies.

And so, that's the reason why I started Sweet Encounter because I specialize in gluten-free and allergy-friendly products.

- How is STEM incorporated into baking?

And what different ingredients do you use when you're baking gluten-free treats?

- Baking truly is a sight.

I tell you that all the time.

From the temperature that you use to bake your items.

Also, we have to measure those ingredients.

With gluten-free, gluten is the thing that kind of binds your baked goods together.

It also kind of creates an elasticity, so I can't use like regular flour.

I use a flour blend that I create.

It has a little bit of brown rice flour, a little bit of white rice flour.

Then I put a little bit of a starch in there, like a tapioca starch, because that needs to help with the binding.

So you kind of have to put a lot of different things in there to kind of substitute for the wheat flour that you would just typically buy at the grocery store.

- So what are we going to be baking today?

- We are making sugar cookies.

For our sugar cookies, we're going use butter.

That's really going to help to give it some good flavor and give it a little bit of moisture.

And then we're gonna add in brown sugar.

Then we're gonna add eggs as a binding agent.

And then we're going to add a little bit of baking soda to give a little bit of lift to our cookie so it doesn't stay too flat.

And lastly, we are going to use a gluten-free flour blend.

So you put these on a cookie sheet and you bake them at 350 for about 10 minutes.

This is our final product.

- Learning about STEM with Nikki Thompson Frazier was a piece of cake.

Explore your possibilities.

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