The Play of Art: History Of Art

Hey, everyone! This play will help you learn about the history of art. For those who like art will probably be interested in the history of art. You can use this play for school and other educational uses if you want to.

Narrator: Welcome to History of Art! Let the play begin.

(Princess enters from Stage A).

Princess (dancing): Nobody knew exactly when the first people started producing art but it is believed that art has been created far back as 100, 000 years ago.

(Strawberry enters from Stage B; Princess exits to Stage B).

Strawberry (smiling bravely): The earliest art work came from Africa in form of stone carvings. There are many examples of cave paintings and carvings from Africa and Europe dating back to 32,000 B.C.

(Princess enters: Strawberry moves to the right of the stage to listen).

Princess: About 9, 000 B.C., people began to change from being traveling nomads to settling down in villages. At this time the art began to evolve into larger pieces. In West Asia and Egypt, the first stone and clay statues were created and that is how artists began to create decorated pottery.

Strawberry: About 3, 000 B.C., people learned how to work with metals and began to create small pieces of art from bronze which was often small statuettes. This was the era when people in Greece and India began to create art and in Egypt, sculptors were large, lifelike stone statues which were painted realistically and were life-size.

Princess: The Dark Age which was around 1, 000 B.C. in East Asia and the Mediterranean Sea led to most people not being able to afford art. Artists stopped making their pieces for several hundred years.

Strawberry: After the Dark Age, it was in Greece that the Archaic and the Classical sculpture was started, along with the black-figure and red-figure vase paintings.

Princess: The Etruscans in Italy started to create large stone and clay statues as well as painted pottery they created.

Strawberry: Things changed when Alexander the Great conquered West Asia in 325 B.C. and people were able to travel throughout the empire. Ideas about art were exchanged and this lead to the first Greek stone statues reaching India with Indian sculptors following Greek methods to carve large statues of Buddha.

Princess: The rise of the Roman Empire spread Greek art to the West as well with artists in North Africa and  North Europe creating pieces of art in the Roman style.

Strawberry: This Roman time was when blown glass became a form of art. It was invented by Phoenician artists  and sold both to England and China.

Princess: In 200 A.D., artists began to experiment and moved away from realistic painting and sculptures to a more abstract form. Statues with larger eyes were to indicate that the subject has a strong soul.

Strawberry: There was a second Dark Age in 459 A.D. after the autumn in Rome. Sadly, not very much art was made for several hundred years.

Princess: In China during this time, they began to make new kinds of painting using a new invention that we use today called paper.

(Princess exited to Stage A). 

Strawberry: In Medieval times, art was evolving and showing the world differently. Christianity became a big theme like Islam did.

Narrator: I hope you enjoyed our play about the History of Art.

(Princess re enters through Stage B). 

(The narrator, Princess, and Strawberry all bow/ curtsy at the same time). 

The End.

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Old Town #4

The History of Cupcakes

Hi there! I decided to research about cupcakes because I was reading a fictional cupcake book. Hope you enjoy the cupcake facts!

The cupcake evolved in the United States in the 19th century, and it was revolutionary because of the amount of time it saved in the kitchen. There was a shift from weighing out ingredients when baking to measuring out ingredients. According to the Food Timeline Web, food historians have yet to pinpoint exactly where the name of the cupcake originated.

There are two theories: one, the cakes were originally cooked in cups and two, the ingredients used to make the cupcakes were measured out by the cup. In the beginning, cupcakes were sometimes called “number” cakes, because they were easy to remember by the measurements of ingredients it took to create them: One cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour, four eggs, one cup of milk, and one spoonful of soda. Clearly, cupcakes today have expanded to a wide variety of ingredients, measurements, shapes, and decorations – but this was one of the first recipes for making what we know today as cupcakes.

Cupcakes were convenient because they cooked much quicker than larger cakes. When baking was down in hearth ovens, it would take a long time to bake a cake, and the final product would often be burned. Muffin tins, also called gem pans, were popular around the turn of the 20th century, so people started created cupcakes in tins.

Since their creation, cupcakes have become a pop culture trend in the culinary world. They have spawned dozens of bakeries devoted entirely to them. While chocolate and vanilla remain classic favorites, fancy flavors such as raspberry meringue and espresso fudge can be found on menus.

There are cookbooks, blogs, and magazines specifically dedicated to cupcakes. Icing, also called frosting in the United States, is a sweet often creamy glaze made of sugar with a liquid, such as water or milk, that is often enriched with ingredients such as butter, egg whites, cream cheese, or flavorings. It is used to cover or decorate baked goods.

Elizabeth Raffald documented the first recipe for icing in 1769 in the Experienced English Housekeeper, according to the Food Timeline. The simplest icing is a glace icing, containing powdered sugar and water. This can be flavored and colored as desired, for example, by using lemon juice in place of the water.

More complicated icings can be made by beating fat into powdered sugar (as in buttercream), by melting fat and sugar together, by using egg whites (as in royal icing), and by adding other ingredients such as glycerin (as in fondant). Some icings can be made from combinations of sugar and cream cheese or sour cream, or by using ground almonds (as in marzipan). The first mention of the cupcake can be traced as far back as 1796, when a recipe notation of “a cake to be baked in small cups” was written in American Cookery by Amelia Simmons.

The earliest documentation of the term cupcake was in ‘Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats’ in 1828 in Eliza Leslie’s Receipts cookbook. In the early 19th century, there were two different uses for the name cup cake or cupcake. In previous centuries, before muffin tins were widely available, the cakes were often baked in individual pottery cups, ramekins, or molds and took their name from the cups they were baked in.

This is the use of the name that has remained, and the name of “cupcake” is now given to any small cake that is about the size of a teacup. The name “fairy cake” is a fanciful description of its size, which would be appropriate for a party of diminutive fairies to share. While English fairy cakes vary in size more than American cupcakes, they are traditionally smaller and are rarely topped with elaborate icing.

The other kind of “cup cake” referred to a cake whose ingredients were measured by volume, using a standard-sized cup, instead of being weighed. Recipes whose ingredients were measured using a standard-sized cup could also be baked in cups; however, they were more commonly baked in tins as layers or loaves. In later years, when the use of volume measurements was firmly established in home kitchens, these recipes became known as 1234 cakes or quarter cakes, so called because they are made up of four ingredients: one cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour, and four eggs.

They are plain yellow cakes, somewhat less rich and less expensive than pound cake, due to using about half as much butter and eggs compared to pound cake. The names of these two major classes of cakes were intended to signal the method to the baker; “cup cake” uses a volume measurement, and “pound cake” uses a weight measurement. Cupcakes have become more than a trend over the years, they’ve become an industry!

Paper baking cups first hit U.S. markets after the end of the World War II. An artillery manufacturer called the James River Corporation began manufacturing cupcake liners for U.S. markets when its military markets began to diminish. By 1969, they consolidated business as a paper company and left artillery manufacturing behind.

During the 1950s, the paper baking cup gained popularity as U.S. housewives purchased them for convenience. Their flexibility grew when bakers realized that they could bake muffins as well as cupcakes in the baking cups. The modern idea of the cupcake is probably different from the historical origin of the phrase.

Imagine what it would be like being a cook in 19th-century Britain or North America. When food historians approach the topic of cupcakes, they run into a gray area in which the practice of making individual cup-sized cakes can become confused with the convention of making cakes with cup-measured ingredients. The notion of baking small cakes in individual containers probably began with the use of clay or earthenware mugs.

It could have been a way to use up extra batter; to make the most efficient use of a hot oven by placing small ramekins, or little baking dishes, in unused spaces; or to create an evenly baked product fast when fuel was in short supply. Early in the 20th century, the advent of multi-cupcake molded tins brought modest mass production methods to cupcake making, and a modern baking tradition was born. Cakes in some form have been around since ancient times, and today’s familiar round cakes with frosting can be traced back to the 17th century, made possible by advances in food technology such as: better ovens, metal cake molds and pans, and the refinement of sugar.

I got it at storify.com but I originally got it at Google Images.

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Websites I used:

https://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/spring07/ayers/history.html

https://people.rit.edu/kge3737/320/project3/history.html

https://recipes.howstuffworks.com/food-facts/who-invented-the-cupcake.htm

https://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventions/a/Who-Invented-The-Cupcake.htm

The Lillian Darnell Star Gazette

The Lillian Darnell Star Gazette coming sooner than you think also   its just the  title  right now. I am just doing this to get every one to attract me and admire me. Just please attract me and admire me, my ad will be coming sooner then you think, at the top it will say, The Lillian Darnell Star Gazette. And interesting facts and saying about me and a picture of me. But you’ll like it.