Background Information
After receiving the Summer Brief I was immediately quite worried because most things I'm interested I'm in aren't really unique to me. My main interest is football, and what with this Summer having the World Cup, it seemed appropriate to do a project based on football, but with a twist on it that was unique to myself.
One of the more trivial unique things about me is that, because of my unwillingness to learn how to "cook properly" at university, I found myself eating a lot of pancakes, normally at least twice a week. This got to the point where at Christmas I was given a pancake making machine with 4 little hobs to cook pancakes on, much more convenient that having to flip a massive one and risk spilling it on the floor.
I never had any intentions of starting the project until after the World Cup though, because if all goes to plan I'll be in a full time job by the time the next World Cup comes around, and so won't be able to follow it religiously until retirement, which meant I wanted to watch as much of this World Cup as possible, and I definitely ended up doing this. It's benefitted my project that I did this though, because a few days after the World Cup final, I saw this link on Facebook that one of my friends had posted. With this, my idea for the Pancake World Cup was born.
Proposal
Their are certain countries around the world that are famous for certain foods. Italy for ice cream, Belgium for chocolate, Germany for sausages etc etc. People across the world eat different food because of their cultures and what's available to them. With this in mind combined with my interest in the World Cup and the odd habit I have for eating pancakes, I wanted to find out which world cup country's cuisine makes the best pancake topping.
This project is meant to be based around first hand research, and I'm fortunate enough in this sense to have family members who've travelled a lot, particularly my grandparents who've been all over the world birdwatching, my mums boyfriend who's travelled around parts of South America, Australia and Asia, as well as an Aunty and Uncle who live in France who both travel to various parts of Africa semi-regularly with their work and on holiday.
In order to figure out what toppings I should use for each countries pancake I will speak to people who I know that have travelled to the countries and areas of the world and find out about the food their from their experience. Hopefully these conversations will provide me with insights about the countries and ideas for toppings. If this proves unsuccessful I will use the internet to give me ideas, but I don't see this as too much of a problem, as the testing process itself will be just about as first hand as it possibly could be.
Format
Following the format of the World Cup of Everything else, I will try the toppings in groups of 4, with the nicest topping going through as group winners and the second nicest going through as runner up. I'll then follow a knockout round and cook a new pancake for each round, meaning that I'll have cooked 62 pancakes in total. To avoid bias or personal preference interfering with my results, I will be asking other people to eat the pancakes, with a different person being the judge for each round, so that the winning pancake will have to satisfy a range of different people, not just myself. This is similar to the World Cup in that the winning team would have to overcome multiple other teams who played in different ways.
