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A Cake's Progress
Science + cake.
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Checkerboard cake
Occasion: Birthday
Details: Chocolate-and-vanilla checkerboard cake, with bonus making-of photo. (I baked 4 regular layers and carefully cut the frozen layers into rings, which I swapped around and stacked alternately to get the pattern.) Filled with a thin layer of chocolate ganache and frosted with vanilla buttercream.
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Smithsonian Gardens cake
The Castle, with the Hirshhorn’s red Mark di Suvero sculpture on the left.
The Hirshhorn.
The National Air & Space Museum.
The National Museum of Natural History (saving the best for last).
Occasion: Smithsonian staff picnic
Details: Almond-raspberry cake, decorated for the “SI Gardens” theme. Decorated in fondant and royal icing with the Smithsonian logo (on top) and four iconic Mall museums, interspersed with flowers to represent the gardens and grounds surrounding them.
#smithsonian#cake decorating#cakestagram#museum#air and space museum#hirshhorn#smithsonian castle#washington dc
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Sea urchin cake
Occasion: PhD defense
Details: Chocolate-orange cake for a friend who studies local adaptation in purple sea urchins. Decorated with white chocolate urchins and pluteus larvae and candied orange peel. (From the archives.)
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Hawaiian-print / wave cake
Occasion: Wedding
Bride: Anthropologist
Groom: Biologist
Details: Hawaii has been very important to them and they are avid surfers, so they requested a cake with a Hawaii / surf scene. Wedding colors were blue and green. Topper was provided by their family (it's not fondant!).
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Snail / sea cucumber cake
Occasion: PhD defense
Details: Peanut butter-chocolate cake for a friend who studies the population dynamics of sea snails and sea cucumbers in small-scale fisheries in Baja California. No fondant, so fairly simple decoration.
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Giant isopod cake
Occasion: Art Show & Garden Party
Details: Giant isopod (Bathynomus giganteus) made of chocolate gingerbread cake with a tempered chocolate exoskeleton. I made the carapace using a Silpat curved between field guides.
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Breaking wave cake
Occasion: PhD defense
Details: Wave breaking over an owl limpet that is grazing algae in the rocky intertidal. For a friend who studies wave impact forces on the west coast.
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Green crab cake!
The cakes have been on hiatus because I've been buried in doctoral dissertation-related activity. But as of last Monday, I successfully defended and am just a little paperwork away from being a useless doctor! Which means there is once again time for cake.
This particular cake was made for my PhD defense by dear friends. I study green crabs, hence the pun + decoration.
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Clownfish cake
Occasion: PhD defense
Theme: Clownfish
Details: My genius friend Malin studies all sorts of amazing marine biology. For one of his doctoral projects, he used DNA to figure out how far baby clownfish go from where they're born. He could use this information to estimate ideal sizing and spacing for marine reserves, a major conservation tool in marine environments.
Random & awesome: Clownfish have amazing sex lives. Every clownfish starts out male, and then becomes female later in life. In a group of clownfish, if the female dies, one of the large males will become female to replace her. Finding Nemo kind of glossed over this part.
Decoration: Cavorting clownfish (specifically, Clark's Anemonefish, Amphiprion clarkii)
Exterior: Bittersweet chocolate ganache with fondant fishes.
Interior: Chocolate cake with a cherry-cream filling.
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Weather cake
Occasion: 60th birthday party
Theme: Weather
Details: My friend Ernest is a fabulous and social guy who is beloved by all who meet him. He has TONS of good friends, and he loves a party, so when he turned 60 he decided to throw himself a real bash. I made the cake. He's a retired meteorologist - formerly with NOAA - so I went with a weather theme.
Random & awesome: One of the pioneers of meteorology was Prince Munjong of South Korea, who in 1441 invented the rain gauge.
Decoration: Thermometer showing that you only get hotter as you get older. I also made a supplemental 9" round cake, to make sure there was enough for the 100+ guests.
Exterior: Lemon buttercream.
Interior: Lemon-poppyseed cake with lemon curd filling.
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Mudsucker and mussel cake
Occasion: PhD thesis defense
Theme: Longjaw mudsuckers and blue mussels
Details: My friend Cheryl studies how animals cope physiologically with differences in temperature and other environmental factors. For her thesis, she primarily studied blue mussels - widespread along the Pacific coast - and longjaw mudsuckers, small estuarine fishes that can survive extreme conditions and even breathe air if necessary.
Random & awesome: The Latin name of the longjaw mudsucker, Gillichthys mirabilis, roughly translates to Gill's miraculous fish. It's named after Theodore Gill, an ichthyologist with a history of excellence in both natural history and facial hair.
Decoration: My take on a mudsucker next to a small pool of water, with a ring of mussels around the bottom.
Exterior: Chocolate ganache with homemade crushed toffee on the sides and fondant accents.
Interior: Chocolate cake with ganache and crushed toffee between the layers. The tradition Hopkins Defense Cake.
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Genetic structure / python scripting cake
Occasion: PhD thesis defense
Theme: Computational population genetics
Details: Coral species can be very hard to tell apart by looks alone, and genetic analysis has shown that what we had thought was a single species might be many more than that. My friend Jason did his thesis work on coral species boundaries using genetics, and developed many of his own analytical approaches and custom scripts. He also did a lot of species assignments with corals using a software called STRUCTURE, which produces neat bar graphs showing group assignment for each individual coral.
Random & awesome: XKCD did a comic about python featuring an "antigravity" module. This module now exists, so you too can import antigravity any time you want.
Decoration: Simple python script on the top, more or less colored the way TextWrangler displays code. On the sides, STRUCTURE diagrams of population genetic structure showing various levels of partitioning.
Exterior: Buttercream frosting. This was a vegetarian cake, so no fondant (it's made with gelatin).
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"Choir of Antarctica" cake
Occasion: Threadcakes 2010
Theme: Based on a Threadless design, "The Choir of Antarctica", for their annual cake competition.
Details: The official entry page (complete with tons of photos) is here. An early experiment with fondant - I didn't win anything, but it was fun.
Random & awesome: A few years ago, the Ig Nobel Prize in Fluid Dynamics went to a legitimate scientific paper entitled: "Pressures produced when penguins pooh? Calculations on avian defaecation." It contains one of the finest scientific figures ever produced.
Decoration: Piano keys as chattering penguins, based on a Threadless design.
Exterior: Fondant, hand-painted with food coloring.
Interior: Yellow cake with chocolate frosting.
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Mondrian cake
Occasion: Art show submission
Theme: Piet Mondrian's art
Details: Inspired by Piet Mondrian and the amazing desserts at the SF MoMA, I thought it'd be fun to make a cake where all the interest was on the inside.
Random & awesome: Although best known for his right-angled, brightly-colored abstract works, Mondrian also painted hundreds of individual flowers throughout his life. This is one of my favorites.
Exterior: Chocolate ganache.
Interior: Almond cake, some dyed with food coloring, separated by artistically-applied ganache.
Recipes: Almond Cake and Bourbon Bittersweet Ganache from Sky High: Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes.
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Kelp forest cake
Occasion: Art show
Theme: Kelp forest ecosystem
Details: West coast kelp forests are a fascinating, finely-balanced ecosystem. Sea otters eat sea urchins, and sea urchins eat kelp. A healthy system has otters and some urchins and a lot of kelp. Take away the otters (like fur hunting did in the 18th and 19th centuries), and urchins populations explode and kelp forests are decimated. When hunting was banned, otters recovered, ate up a lot of the urchins, and the kelp regrew. This cake shows all three major players: giant kelp, purple sea urchins, and a sea otter.
Random & awesome: My dad refers to otters as "sea weasels", which is actually taxonomically appropriate. They're the largest member of the weasel family, and can weight nearly 100 pounds.
Exterior: Fondant, handled with vegetable oil instead of cornstarch, which is why it's so shiny. This was the first or second cake I ever decorated with fondant.
Interior: Chocolate cake filled and frosted with chocolate ganache.
Recipes: Classic Rolled Fondant from The Cake Bible. Not sure about the cake or ganache recipes anymore.
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Agarose gel cake
Occasion: Molecular Ecology end-of-course
Details: When I assistant-taught a Molecular Ecology class, I made my students a cake for the last day of class. They did a lot of labwork, mostly running DNA on gels that looked like this. In their honor, this gel came out perfectly - there's a standard ladder and a negative control, and all the "samples" amplified.
Random & awesome: One of my former students wrote hilarious (and scientifically sound!) songs about St. Patrick's Day and Mother's Day.
Decoration: Frosting DNA bands on a frosting gel background. Wells for loading DNA were carefully cut out of the frosting with a knife.
The students liked it. I later got a teaching award for that class, so clearly the cake paid off.
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Diatom cake
Occasion: PhD thesis defense
Theme: Sinking diatoms
Details: Diatoms are tiny, single-celled algae that are super-abundant in the world's oceans. Their populations typically boom and bust, and when they bust, huge numbers of diatoms sink to the ocean floor, bringing surface carbon with them. My friend Kevin studied the physics of diatom sinking, and how it changes with the size and shape of individual diatoms.
Random & awesome: Diatoms make hard shells of silica, and they come in a crazy and beautiful array of shapes. Seriously, this cake is not exaggerating them at all.
Decoration: Lots and lots of diatoms, presumably sinking.
Exterior: All fondant. Used a series of tiny cookie cutters to do a lot of the diatoms.
Recipes: Classic Rolled Fondant from The Cake Bible. I have no idea what's inside anymore.
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