Science Cookie Roundup #8

Time for the long overdue Not So Humble Pie Science Cookie Roundup #8! I'm sorting through the blog's bloated email account this morning and I realize we have a great many submissions for this roundup. So let's get down to it!

Science Cookie Roundup #7

Inspired By Wolfe--who will forever have a special place in my heart for making the medieval Beef y-Stywyd--sent me the following email:

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.

Science Cookie Cutter Set Giveaway!

Happy Monday, everyone!

We're giving away a set of cookie cutters today!

You may remember this set from the last science cookie roundup. They're made by scientist Sherry of sciencecookiecutters.com and she has kindly offered to give away a set to one of the blog's readers.

Interested in baking up your own nerdy cookies?

Science Cookie Roundup #6

I'm looking through all the fantastic science cookie roundup submissions in my email box this morning--scattered amongst the mountains of emails telling me I've won £500,000,000--and it looks like it is time for another roundup!

This time I have a few of my own cookies to include.

Though you must forgive the pastel colors. While crafting these cookies I was also making butterfly cookies with the young daughter of our UK house guest.


We've got beakers, flasks and test tubes! Best of all, I didn't have to hand cut them. I got my hands on a set of science cookie cutters. The first I've ever seen.


The set included cutters for flasks, test tubes, atoms and beakers.

They're big!

I came across these cutters after reading an email from a physicist/chemist who works at a science museum. She was tired of hand cutting shapes (totally understandable) and ordered a custom set of cookie cutters from a manufacturer. Only she had to order a minimum of 2000 sets to have her design made. To unload the surplus cutters she decided to offer them up to the science-cookie loving public:www.sciencecookiecutters.com

I think Sherry is onto something. When she sells out--and she probably will--I think she should consider having other designs made up. Please? The nerdy baking community needs you. I need you. At the very least, I will buy them. Hand cutting macrophages is a pain!

Sherry sent in the cookies she made for a teachers workshop for the round up and a picture of her custom cutter set. As well as a brain cake they made for their biology meeting.

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We have a lot of cakes this round up!

The next cake I received was from Carmela of Mela's Baking Adventures, whom I'm now hopelessly in love with.

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.

Love the video, check it out:

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If the idea of eating a human torso doesn't disturb you, the next cake may...

Christine, an entomology grad student, of dragonflywoman.wordpress.com sent me this email and cake:

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.

Say it with me, folks: AHHHHHHHHHHGGGGG!

So realistic! I love it... after I got over my initial horror.

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The next cake is from Carolyn, a grad student working on marine evolutionary genetics.

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.

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Our next set of cookies comes from Catherine, a biology undergrad.

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.

Love the little piping gel goggles on the scientists! And the lasagna pan-cardboard cutters did a great job! Going all Macgyver on the science cookie creation. Right on!

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Kristina, a post-doc biochemist/biophysicist sent a sample of her baking. These perfect female spectral karyotype cupcakes!



Based on Martha's Caterpillar Cupcakes.

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Because a science cookie roundup wouldn't be complete without some version of a lab mouse, we our next cake by Sunmi.

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!

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Our last submission is from one of the youngest bakers to contribute (16!), Chelsea Ann of Chelsea Ann Coconut.

Chelsea sent in these absolutely fantastic cookies representing neurons, neuromuscular junction, spine with nerves.

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 :)

I think I got everyone in this month's round-up. If I missed you (the blog's email box is roughly 99% spam, it happens), email me at notsohumblepieblog@gmail.com.

If you would like to be in the next round up, shoot me an email with links or photos of your science-themed edible goodies. Including "Science Cookies" or "Science Roundup" in the subject line helps ensure I don't miss you.

Toodles!

Ms. H

Science Cookie Roundup #5

Science cookie roundup time!

This month is a particularly good roundup. I had a ton of submissions, representing science themes from a wide variety of disciplines. Also a wide variety of baked goods. I have cookies, cakes, and even the first science themed cake pop!

So our first post comes from Jackie of Food-ology. You may remember her from last months pie contest, she submitted the yummy savory pie (er pudding!).

Love everything she submitted. I'm sure everyone will agree the mouse cake is fantastic. Though... is that needle-less syringe IACUC compliant?

"To explain the photos... I was in a Cancer Biology program so I've got a mouse cake with a (cupcake) tumor. (Yes, that's a real syringe. But it's OK- there was no needle- and it was sterile!)"

"I also have two cakes I made for two graduate students' qualifying exams: a cake with the life cycle of dictyostelium, since he was the first person in our lab to work on dicty, and a cake depicting the other student's thesis project on cell-cell adhesion."

"Finally, I have bio/ med related cupcakes I made for the the Stanford Association for Multi-disciplinary Medicine and Science (SAMMS) club. The chocolate decorations include: beakers, benzene rings, mice, graphs, radiation symbols, medicine logo, microarrays."

"FYI: I have the SAMMS decorations, demonstrating the chocolate technique, also on my blog here: http://food-ology.blogspot.com/2009/02/so-ive-been-commissioned-to-make-cake.html The final product is here."

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Cindy submitted our first batch of science themed cake pops! So happy to see the cake pop take a nerdy turn.

"I love to make cake pops; so for the final exam in Organic II class, I made these methane pops for my student (thankfully they understood the molecule!)"

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Jennifer, a Chicago biology teacher sent in her gel electrophoresis cookies!

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Penny sent in these sweet Emoticon cookies. I wish I had a chance to see the whole tray. Funny that only sad or rather nonplussed emotes are left uneaten. No one wants a sad cookie?

"Saw these emoticon cookies at the Literature.Culture.Media Research Slam at UC-Santa Barbara yesterday. I didn't catch the whole tray, only what was left toward the end of our session. Apparently the presenter (Zach Horton, a student at UCSB) brought a wide array of emoticon cookies."

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Emily, who also submitted a pie to last months contest (the chocolate cream pie several of you are very fond of) also sent me some mice cookies with her pie submission.

"I attached some lab rat cookies I made a few months ago - thanks for this idea! I loved it and my friend (who indeed works in a lab with rats) appreciated the cookie gesture."

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Catherine, a PhD student and a baker, sent me some fantastic cakes!

I study neurotransmission in C elegans, so I made this C elegans cake with GFP labeled nervous system for my lab picnic:

I've also had the opportunity to bake a couple of cakes for my friends' thesis defenses. My friend and lab mate Andy is in the neuroscience department:

My friend Stacey just defended her PhD in biomedical engineering. She makes nanoparticles that can be used in vaccines - she fills the nanoparticles with antigens and decorates the outsides with Toll-like receptor ligands. That way the immune system will easily recognize the nanoparticles and make antibodies against the antigens inside! Awesome!

I made a vanilla funfetti cake (baked in a bowl) and decorated the outside with colored chocolate squiggles (ligands).

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Julie, Helie, and Melody sent me all these cookies. They went on a science cookie baking spree to give away to their teachers.

My favorite have to be the calculus cookies.

Math: Here we did e, phi, an matrix (which at first glance appears to be the identity matrix), and a graphical representation of a Riemann Sum.

Chemistry: The ideal gas law, complete with the value of R for (L*atm)/(mol * K) and an atom. Our Chemistry teacher also happens to be a music teacher, so we included the music notes.

Calculus: (top to bottom) The integration rule for 1/x dx, the First Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, and the Mean Value Theorem

Biology: Our Biology teacher loves to emphasize the role of form and function in biology, so we, of course, had to include that on a cookie. The yellow/white is our attempt at a petri dish with some bacteria. The last one is a karyotype (male).

Animal Cell: This is our greatest success yet--the cookie _is_ actually the size of that paper plate. We have the nucleus, surrounded by the blue endoplasmic reticulum. There are also yellow mitochondria, the green/blue Golgi body, and light blue free ribosomes! The green/pink blob is our representation of phagocytosis.

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http://mostlyfoodstuffs.blogspot.com/2010/03/baby-shower-cookies-aka-sugar-cookies.html

Science cookies are invading baby showers now!

Deena made these beauties and did just a fantastic job on the icing.

"There comes a time in life when it seems like almost everyone you know is having babies. At first, it kind of floors you every time you hear the news, and you struggle to come up with a gift commensurate to the occasion. In years past, I crafted ornate homemade cards, cooked obscene amounts of food, and stitched patchwork quilts and a stuffed pink satin armadillo. But as more and more friends began to have babies, I realized that keeping up with that sort of gifting protocol could quickly become a second job. I started turning to the gift registry, pairing a cotton onesie with a heartfelt card and calling it a day. For the most part, this seems appropriate. But every now and then, I hear about the pregnancy of a friend who is so dear that the registry just doesn't cut it. I start looking around for a more personal way to share the love. And recently, I hit upon these baby shower cookies."That's when sperm cookies are called for. Oh yes, that's right. Try to eat those in front of others with a straight face."

To read more about them, see her blog at Mostlyfoodstuffs.blogspot.com



Yes that is a sperm cookie. Try to eat that around others and maintain a straight face.

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I'm a sucker for anthropology cookies so I was pretty happy to see this set from Lauren, a lecturer and research assocaite at UC Santa Cruz, in my mail box. Homid fossil cookies!

"I am a biological anthropologist who wishes she were a baker. I dabble in cakes and cookies, the occasional pie, but certainly nothing as lovely or fancy as those items that you spotlight on your website. Nevertheless, the nerd in me just couldn't help not trying out some science themed cookies of my own. So I enlisted the help of a like-minded (i.e. nerdy baker) archaeology grad student in my department and we spent the day attempting to make some contributions for the science cookie #5 round-up.

I must confess that we found the royal icing to be a bit of a royal pain. We couldn't really figure out the stiffness so we either made too stiff or too runny for the job required. Hopefully next time that will go smoother. We also had an issue with our icing dyes. I purchased some gel colors from Sur la Table thinking that they must be superior to the old liquid drops from Safeway because, well, they cost more. And were at Sur La Table. But the dye gets all over your hands when you open it, and then all over everything else, and took a lot of washing (and lemons and vinegar to remove). Do share your secret for how you color your icing and if it is these gel colors, how do you open them and add color without looking like you have been tie dyed? Rubber gloves, perhaps?

(I just unscrew the tops and use a clean toothpick to move a drop of gel from the bottle to the icing. I learned quickly that squeeze bottles are unpredictable and gel color is dangerous. )

"These photos represent homologous chromosomes that have just crossed over during Meiosis 1."

"I have attached some photos of our first attempt. The first photo is a profile of the cranium of the newly described Australopithecus sediba (which I actually think is much more Homo-like, but that doesn't alter the cookie. But since you are a biological anthropologist, I thought some context may be important)."

(I may need to get out my calipers to double check this cookie... just kidding)

"Then there's a Darwin fish..."

"...and a skeleton representation of a javelina"

"And the last picture is where my cookie partner Cristie got really nerdy. She is a zooarchaeologist who specializes in fish bones. So there's a bony fish. And an otolith, which I learned is a bony sensory organ in a fish's inner ear that helps with balance. I'm sure that is the first otolith cookie to have been emailed in, right?"

Yup! That is most certainly my first otolith cookie. Great set!

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Ruth sent me some really realistic mice cookies. I need to ask her how she gave the mice such a realistic furry texture.

"There are lots of really fat ob/ob mice, who have a genetic mutation that
means they can't produce leptin, so they never feel full and they never
stop eating ."

There are also the blue mice (I think maybe they're actually rats, I'm not
sure), who've been given the food colourant FD&C blue No. 1, which has
helped them recover faster after a spinal injury, also with a picture of
the mice from the proper research.
(http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/bluerats/)

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Definitely RA of http://definitelyra.wordpress.com/ sent me these sparkly binary cookies!

"On Tuesday, JG’s AP computer science class took their exam, and it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to make for them. The test is on Java, technically, but I don’t know enough about it to make a witty joke, and I sure as heck did not want to write out lines of code. So, I opted to go basic and made ones and zeros, hoping they would get the joke.

One problem: I aimed to make 3 dozen cookies and ended up with over 50, and there was no way I could outline and flood that many cookies after work in time for the next school day. Instead, I decided to experiment by covering them with sparkly sanding sugar."

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Rebecca sent me these beautiful science themed cookies for her son's 2nd birthday

"... I found myself quite taken by the design of the Ishihara color blindness tests I remember doing as a kid (I was particularly inspired by #12, found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishihara_color_test. I was thinking of doing the invitations with this design, but MY GOD, all those dots."

"So, I thought, let's do cookies and EAT THEM instead."

"I freehanded all the 2s, then did the dots around them in the contrasting color. Used your instructions and everything. My first time with this method of frosting cookies. Learned a lot. THANKS for the help!"

Isn't that just the cutest little boy?!


I think I got everyone in this month's round-up. If I missed you, email me at notsohumblepieblog@gmail.com. If you would like to be in the next round up, shoot me an email with your baked goodies.