This state is due to my flinging it from my luggage at last week's conference. If there was such a thing as laptop discus throwing, I would have earned myself a gold medal. I had truly excellent distance and form.
Thankfully, my replacement is on the way.
2. I've had an unusually busy month. I have been traveling and I am leaving town once again to do volunteer work this week.
3. I'm adjusting to my new status as pregnant baking blogger. My time in the kitchen has been made complicated as the sight of softened butter now brings about waves of nausea. (Of all the possible things, why does it have to be THAT!) Not exactly a blessing for a person who often finds herself elbow deep in quanties of butter that would shock even Paula Dean.
Even thinking about butter now, as I write this, is risky. Infact, reading cookbooks is now suddenly something I do at my own peril. Where I used to find inspiration, I now find photos of evil puff pastry onion tarts that leave me heaving.
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| Don't look directly at the onion tart! |
4. I have been baking, it is just that the results have ALL been lousy, unfortunate looking food. Stuff that doesn't belong anywhere on the blog. Maybe it has something to do with the fatigue of early pregnancy, or the accompanying absent-mindedness that has resulted in one good sized kitchen fire and four broken dishes (that's just this week). Or perhaps, it is just hard to lovingly and carefully craft desserts that the sight of which make you want to hurl.
So that is what's going on at the Humble household, Dad (and everyone else).
Hopefully my baking luck changes tonight and I can get at least one set of blog worthy baking photos to take with me on my trip, but as I've botched no less than THREE desserts today, things are not looking very promising. So if we have yet another week of absentee Ms. Humble, I hope you'll bear with me.
I did borrow an annoyingly tiny netbook for while I am on the road, so I will at the very least be getting caught up on the backlog of emails, questions and comments.
I will be home again by Saturday and that will put an end to all my traveling for a while and I can sort out things in the kitchen and get back into my blogging groove.
Patience, I do have something fun lined up for when I get back into the kitchen.
Ms. H
I am nominating my friend Kathy who blogs over at Play, Eat, Learn, Live. For her daughter's 7th birthday, she organised a science-themed birthday party, including science experiment party games and pass the parcel with science themed prizes. The piece de resistance was the 'birthday cake' which took the form of cupcakes in the design of the periodic table. Once I heard her plans, I volunteered to help and we spent an evening icing 118 cupcakes with the correct chemical symbols. It's fair to say that until I began to ice 118 cupcakes, I did not fully comprehend how many cupcakes there were! Kathy has blogged about our experience in icing the cupcakes here:Oh, I do commiserate. The periodic table is a huge undertaking.
After reading all the comments ( which were all great) and making sure they followed directions, I cut and pasted into a table then random.org'd it because I couldn't put a higher value on newton vs someone's dad!Totally understandable, Sherry. So the winning comment was...
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| French macarons don't get any more perfect than this. |
We're going to pretend that the wrinkled cloth looks super-artistic 
I should clean the crumbs off the cake stand before snapping photos...
They're big!
I am a Pre-Med student going into my Junior year of undergrad. I was accepted into a program that gives early acceptance to medical school. One of the requirements of the program is to take classes at the medical school each summer, and at the end of the summer, we celebrate our hard work with a dinner banquet and talent show.
For the talent show, I decided to make a cake of an anatomy model (something that all of us at the program could relate to). I have included pictures of the cake, which is red velvet and is sitting on a blue sterile field. If you'd like to see the "surgeons" (aka caterers) in action, I posted those pictures on my blog.
Good thing he/she is only partially anatomically correct, eh. I will take a slice of liver, please.
I have also included the link to the video that I presented at the talent show. My brother put the video together since my talent is not in video editing, but in baking. I hope you like it and will consider posting it in the next Science Cookie Round up.
A friend of mine (Cheryl) in a wildlife and natural resources program defended her Ph.D. about a year ago. In her department, it's customary to turn defenses into potlucks and almost everyone shows up with some sort of treat to share with everyone else. Another friend, Jess, was interested in bringing a cake to the defense and asked if I wanted to help out and of course I did. Cheryl studies crayfish and Jess used to be one of Cheryl's employees for the project, so we planned (while on a boat taking water samples for work) to make a somewhat realistic crayfish cake based on Jess's knowledge of crayfish habitats and behaviors. We then scoured every toy store, party supply shop, and grocery store in the city looking for crayfish or lobster toys to put on the cake with no success. In desperation, Jess (an excellent fisherwoman) eventually thought to look at a bait shop. She bought four fantastic, rather realistic plastic crayfish lures and the crayfish cake was born.
Crayfish make burrows in mud at the bottom of the streams where they live, so we dug some holes out of our chocolate cake to represent burrow before we frosted everything with chocolate frosting. We went with chocolate in part because it is delicious and in part because we needed the cake to look muddy. We then tucked three of the four crayfish lures into the "burrows" after we carefully removed the hooks. They have their claws out like they would in the wild so that they're ready to defend their burrows from challengers. The fourth crayfish didn't have a burrow, so we placed him claw to claw with one of the burrow-holding crayfish to illustrate that it was challenging the resident crayfish to a fight for the burrow. We further decorated the cake with green sprinkles (representing algae) and chocolate sprinkles (representing clumps of mud or small rocks - the piles in front of the "burrows" are there to represent the materials they've excavated while digging the burrows) to give the whole thing a more realistic feel. It was an easy cake to make and the decorations were very simple, but we were quite proud of the realistic feel and scientific accuracy of our cake - until we brought it to the defense and NO ONE WOULD EAT IT! Apparently we had made it too real and people were scared to eat it, thinking that we'd put dead crayfish on it. Jess and I each had a big piece to let everyone know that it really was cake and that it was in fact edible (and tasty!), but we didn't get any takers. Still, Cheryl loved it, so we considered it a success.
A few months ago, I helped teach a course in Molecular Ecology. For the last class, I made the students a gel electrophoresis cake as a reward for all their long nights at the gel bench. It's a simple chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream icing. It's iced to accurately reflect the size of the DNA fragments they were amplifying, complete with primer-dimer and a blank well as a control.
Electrophoresis cake, fantastic! It is about time! Now I want to see someone in the field get over their agar repulsion and make a pertri dish cake.The other cake depicts a kelp forest ecosystem, and was made as a submission to a friend's Art Show and Garden Party. We're mostly all marine biologists, so the cake represents a classic ecological interaction between sea otters (which eat sea urchins), purple sea urchins (which eat kelp), and of course, kelp (which shelters sea otters). The breakdown of this system with the removal of sea otters is a classic example of a trophic cascade-- but this cake ecosystem is balanced and happy, and even has a few garibaldi for color. This is a dark chocolate cake with brandied ganache, decorated with fondant (of course).
This has to be one of the prettiest science cakes submitted to date. Gorgeous.
I am finishing up my undergrad in Biology this year and taking an 8 week Microbiology class. I decided to spice things up a bit and make micro cookies to share with them all! Here are a few of them: agar plates, scientists and my favorite virus (to learn about not acquire)... the T4 Bacteriophage!! I ended up making these cookie cutters by cutting out the bottom of an aluminum lasagna pan and shaping them around a design I had made on some thick cardboard, and then I stapled it together.
Based on Martha's Caterpillar Cupcakes.For the past two years I have been working in a transplant immunology research lab, spending most of my waking hours with the thousands of mice that my lab uses. When I started working full-time, I found myself with free time on my hands for the first time since middle school, so I began trying out new recipes, churning out baked goods faster than my roommates and I could eat them. Of course the natural solution was to bring the excess food to the lab, and pretty soon I became established as the resident baker of the lab. I even received a marriage proposal the first time I brought cookies for the animal facility staff!
I wanted to make something special for this past Friday since it was my last day at the lab, so I turned to your science cookie posts for inspiration. I settled on a mouse(-shaped) cake (not a cake made of mouse!), which got a great reaction from everyone who saw it. Its proportions are like those of a 2- to 3-week-old mouse, which is my favorite age for mice. I like to think of it as the mouse equivalent of the human 2- to 3-year-old, when it is impossible for anyone not to be adorable. :)
The cake in progress:
Great idea for the whiskers!I just finished a week of work experience with a neurosurgeon! It was absolutely amazing and to say thanks, I made these cookies. I'm a bit proud :)
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