A cooking class over the summer led Grace Rhoten to an ambitious project that will provide 250 cookbooks to people who use a local food pantry.

Rhoten, 18, of Willow Springs is a senior at Lyons Township High School. Over the summer, she led a cooking class and wound up writing her own cookbook, “Edible Engineering,” with 25 recipes that run from dinners to desserts.

“I’ve always loved baking and I’ve come up with a lot of recipes over the years, but I also really love science. Over the summer, me and one of my friends, Madelyn Hart, ran this summer camp called ‘Kitchen Chemists’ at my house,” Rhoten said.

Hart, 17, of Western Springs also is a senior at Lyons Township.

“It was a good experience to work with kids and see how much they really enjoy our baking and science activities. That got me started working on the cookbook,” Rhoten said.

She wanted all students, not just those she was working with, to experience the joys of cooking. She tested the recipes, took photos of the results and designed her own cookbook. She thought of bringing it to libraries, reached out to several food pantries and the Westchester Food Pantry was very interested, she said.

“That’s who we’re working with right now. We’re trying to get 250 copies (of the cookbook) printed by Christmas (for the pantry). It’s been a crazy few months and it’s exciting to see how far it’s come,” Rhoten said.

She meets with 11 other Lyons students each Sunday afternoon to discuss plans for the project.

“We have four different groups working on different projects. The distribution group, the finance team, the tech team does our social media and the contact team comes up with different ideas for the future,” Rhoten said.

One of those students is sophomore Zara Ibrahim, 16, of Burr Ridge.

“It’s really cool and it’s really inspiring. She’s a really motivated person,” Ibrahim said of Rhoten.

Most of the fundraising has been done on-line with the gofundme page, she said. As of Nov. 17, the group had raised $1,155 from 28 donors at the gofundme page.

The listed goal is $3,000, but Rhoten said they are close to reaching it.

“We’ve raised about $2,300, including money from cookbook sales and cash that we’ve received,” she said.

The first chapter is classic recipes such as brownies. The way it’s structured, the left page has the recipe and the right side has an explanation of a science topic,” she said.

One recipe is for making rock candy and it explains how a lot of sugar is needed for the sugar to crystalize, she said.

“You have to think about a lot more things than I knew. I looked at a lot of cookbooks in my house. How do I want the layout to be? I took inspiration from cookbooks I’d seen and did my own research, kept working on it,” she said.

An online site called lulu will be printing the cookbooks. If you buy one cookbook, two will be donated, she said. The goal is to have the cookbooks ready and delivered to the food pantry by Christmas, Rhoten said.

Ibrahim noted that it’s a good thing the group of students is so focused.

“We actually found a typo in the book,” Ibrahim said. “Too little flour. We baked the cookies. And they ended up really flat.”

Folks at the Westchester Food Pantry “thought it was a really good idea.”

Rhoten said the pantry has clients in towns that send students to Lyons Township High School. She had reached out to other food pantries, “but we don’t have the resources now to fulfill that many requests, so we had to focus on this one.”

Looking ahead, she hopes this won’t be a one-and-done.

“I think in the coming years we may try to organize bigger fundraising events and do more year-round so we can help more food pantries or maybe libraries and schools in our area as well,” she said.

For information and to donate, visit https://www.gofundme.com/f/teens-teach-stem