With a little help from a square springform pan, you too can have an Apple apple pie for dessert!
Continue reading Now that’s an Apple Pie!
Category Archives: Play with your food
Binary Birthday
I am this many.
Have you ever heard of the unary number system, i.e., base-1 numerals? That’s the formal designation of tally marks– a means of representing a number symbolically by using symbols, where the number represented is equal to the number of symbols. While easy to grasp, it’s also a rather inefficient system, so we don’t find too many uses of them in modern life. One of the places that we do (almost) always use the unary system is on birthday cakes, where a birthday cake has one candle per year. This is fine for small numbers, but positioning, lighting and blowing out candles becomes impractical past a certain point.
Here’s a better way: A binary birthday candle. It consists of a single candle with seven wicks, where the wicks that are lit represent the birthday individual’s age in binary. This single candle design works flawlessly to represent any age from 1 to 127, never requiring anyone below the age of 127 to blow out more than a mere six candles at a time.
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Edible Googly Eyes in the New York Times
Our Edible Googly Eyes recipe (original post here) has made it to the New York Times to accompany an article about The Hungry Scientist Handbook. Woo-hoo!
High Cuisine for Halloween: Eyeball Caprese
Insalata caprese, an Italian classic, becomes an instant halloween classic as well.
The traditional ingredients for this delicate salad are fresh mozzarella, basil, plum tomatoes and olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper. Our version goes only slightly further, adding a thin slice of olive as the garnish. And, a clever trick produces perfectly round pupils every time.
Continue reading High Cuisine for Halloween: Eyeball Caprese
The Hungry Scientist Handbook
Today is the official release date for the Hungry Scientist Handbook, a new book by Patrick Buckley and Lily Binns.
The Hungry Scientist Handbook was conceived as a sort of cookbook for geek-centric food and– using the word a different way– as an a cookbook for food-oriented electronics– as evidenced by projects varying from polyhedral pies to LED lollipops.
We met Patrick and Lily at the 2006 Maker Faire, where they invited us to contribute a couple of chapters to their project. We did, and it’s finally out!
(We aren’t the only ones who are excited– we’ve seen write-ups at the LA Times and
Wired this week.)
We contributed a total of nine projects to the Hungry Scientist Handbook, some of which we have written about here. These include the Computer Chip Trivets, Crafty fridge magnets, Edible Origami, and (making a cameo appearance) the Lego Trebuchet.
We also contributed a few new cooking projects that involve dry ice: Dry (Ice) Martinis, Fizzy dry ice lemonade, and Dry ice root beer. (With Floating bubbles on CO2 as a bonus project.)
And… a brand new exclusive Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories electronics project that we developed just for the Hungry Scientist Handbook: Smart Coasters.
Smart Coasters are cast-plastic coasters for your drink that light up red when you put a hot drink on top and light up blue with a cold drink. The design is fully analog– no microcontrollers and no programming– and they incorporate a solar cell so that the whole thing is hermetically sealed: waterproof and washable. Complete step-by-step DIY instructions are included for both the electronics and the resin casting.
You can purchase the Hungry Scientist Handbook at booksellers including Amazon. Also visit their new web site, www.hungryscientist.com.
Enjoy new taste thrills with skewered food!
The cheerful vintage packaging card for these lovely Kenberry stainless skewers proclaims that “whatever you like, it will taste better on a skewer.” This set came from the hallowed halls of Urban Ore in Berkeley. It is hard to imagine anyone who could have resisted the exhortation to “enjoy barbecue taste thrills year round indoors & out!” More pictures including close ups of all of the suggested skewer uses (“for individual shish-kebob service,” “for meat birds,” and “for good eating”) are in this flickr set for your enjoyment.
Five Minute Project: Hot Dog Bun Grilling Jig
Cooking hot dogs (and similarly shaped things) on the backyard grill is one of those classic American summer traditions. One of the weaker parts of this scheme is preparing the hot dog buns. I happen to like mine toasty and warm and crunchy, and without the hinges broken! Not everyone likes grilled buns, but for those of us who do, this is a legitimate concern. Folding buns wide or flat to grill them seems to universally weaken the hinges to the point that they are prone to break upon introduction of a sausage, particularly if there are condiments involved.
So, here’s our quick DIY Hot Dog Bun Grilling Jig, which holds your bun open at the perfect angle while it warms on the grill, forming a sturdy toasted structure with potentially good hinge integrity. Bonus: by grabbing the jig, you can use tongs to set down and pick up your bun without fear of a squished bun.
Continue reading Five Minute Project: Hot Dog Bun Grilling Jig
"That’s no melon!"
One cantaloupe, a knife, and five minutes. Your very own (and very tasty) planet-killing superweapon.
Hint 1: Center the “crater” around where the stem was connected so that the darker fibers under the skin point towards the center of it.
Hint 2: Stretch a string around the melon to help guide your equatorial trench.
(Also: you don’t really need that exhaust port. It’s a weakness.)
Cubyrop: the perfect candy
We first discovered Cubyrop via flickr and were smitten, so we put them in an Amazon wishlist. But after more than a year, we happened to just come across a bag of them at Nijiya(a Japanese supermarket) and were thrilled!
The verdict? Cubyrop are intensely charming — even better in person than they look in the photos. They are hard candy, intensely fruit flavored as only Japanese candies can be. While the name would imply that they are perfect cubes, they are indeed perfect but are not always cubes– the sides vary from 11-13 mm. They come wrapped two to a package, which is just the right amount of sweet and flavor.
They are color coded:
- Orange = Mango
- Yellow = Lemon
- Orange = Orange
- Dark Pink = Grape
- Super Light Pink = Litchi
- Green = Melon
- Light Pink = Peach
- Medium Pink = Strawberry
Mango and orange are difficult to tell apart visually, but they definitely taste different. Cubyrop also come in a (slightly larger) gummy variety, which also have intense flavoring but are jiggly with a dusting of sour powder. (Note: Some of you who grew up in the same era as us may also have an innate fear of gelatinous cubes.) There is also a variety labeled as throat drops, with some sort of cough-drop powder in the center of the cubes. They taste vaguely medicinal, but are still significantly better than most cough drops.
As with so many Japanese products, presentation is everything. The product shape carries over into the font, and the square color coding for the flavors is listed both in English on the front and in Japanese on the back. Charming, andtasty! What more could you want?
20 millicenturies of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
Happy birthday to us! Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories is now two years of age. Collected below is a “Best of Evil Mad Scientist” for the past year: Some of our favorite projects that we’ve published over the last twelve months. Here’s to the next year!
Quick projects:
Rubberbands made from old bicycle innertubes.
Light tent made from a lampshade.
Spool spinner from an old fan.
The $1.00 C to D adapter
Electronics projects
How to make a Joule Thief from Make: Weekend Projects.
How to make a dark-detecting LED night light.
The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronic Junk
How to make a Sawed-off USB Key
AVR microcontroller projects
Using an ADXL330 accelerometer with an AVR microcontroller
Kit Projects
Crafty Projects
Food Hacking
CandyFab
Printing complex shapes: Sugar Chain
Candyfab improvements: higher resolution and edible output
Papercraft:
Rotary Fraction Adding Machine
Observations & silly projects:
Lego Projects:
Forbidden Lego review & build
Reviews:
Lee Valley & Veritas Catalog Review
Teardowns:
