My old friend Kevin sent in these pictures of a massive array of tasty electronic treats that he and his family made for a group picnic at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Nice work!) If your diet is short on precision op-amps and instrumentation amplifiers, these just might hit the spot.
You can read our own article about circuitry snacks (dated July 11, 2007) here.
It would seem that the Flying Spaghetti Monster has seen fit to bless this bag of Haribo “Sour S’ghetti” with his noodly presence. (Ramen.)
We came across this while working on the Circuitry Snacks project– they were one of the candidates that we originally thought might be good to serve as edible “wires.” Go figure.
[Related: FSM Costume, FSM Toast]
How to cook hot dogs… with electricity!
[Disclaimerzilla: While we could give you lots of warnings about all the different dangers involved and how to possibly skirt them, the simple truth is that this just isn’t safe. If you are foolish enough to attempt this, you will have to deal with pointy things, raw electricity out of the wall, hot steam, and the possibility of fire. If that isn’t enough, and you succeed, you are still faced with the possibility of having to eat a hot dog. In summary: do not, under any circumstances, cook hot dogs this way.]
Continue reading Cooking hot dogs via electrocution
Here’s how to take your left over Marshmallow Peeps, add a few components, and make them into pimped-out peepmobiles.
Okay, so Easter has come and gone. Really gone. And if you’re like us, you didn’t eat all of your Peeps. Have they gone bad by now? Probably not. As it turns out, the yellow chick-shaped Peeps are made all year long to build up enough supply for each easter, so the ones that you get for Easter could *already* be a year old. (So why can’t you buy them all year long? You can… you just have to know where to look.)
Even if you’re still saving your Chicks to eat them later, you’re not alone. The official Peeps site has a poll up asking whether you like your Peeps “Fresh from the package or aged to perfection.” According to the results so far, a full 12% of peepeaters like to wait six months or more.
However, we seem to be digressing. Let’s just go ahead and assume that you weren’t going to eat all of them. Then whatever’s left, you can make into Peepmobiles.
Continue reading Make a peepmobile
This is a rendering of the sculpture Soliton by Bathsheba Grossman, as output by the CandyFab 4000; it’s a three-dimensional form made out of pure sugar. Seeing Bathsheba’s sculptures at the 2006 Maker Faire was the inspiration for us to build the machine in the first place, so it’s quite exciting to be able to print this. (The design is used by her kind permission– please buy some of her sculptures!)
This is our second try at fabbing this difficult shape. Our first attempt was at a somewhat smaller size and ran into trouble with the thin beams when *one* of our thin horizontal layers turned out to be too weakly bonded. To avoid a second failure, we enlarged the model but also ran the heater element very hot and for an extended period of time to make the pixels srong, but also larger, more rounded, and richer in color– a darker caramel.
In this view we’re looking right down at the printed layers of sugar; we think that the grain of the layers makes this look a lot like a wood carving.
Of course, that’s not all that we’ve been printing this week. Here is one more large-scale object that we made:
The shape is a 3/4 twist mobius strip with a square cross section and windows cut at regular intervals in all of the sides the side. Even though it’s hollow, it still weighs seven pounds and fourteen ounces– that’s a lot of sugar. We’re bringing this monster to Maker Faire this weekend, so you can see it for yourself, too.
Fused deposition machines are an interesting class of rapid prototyping and art robots, capable of extruding paint onto a canvas or extruding to build up complex, three-dimensional objects one layer at a time. Naturally, one of the challenging parts of designing machines like these is designing and building a system for dispensing the printing medium. So, imagine how surprised we were when we were walking through the aisles of our local Michaels craft store and saw a pre-built extruder on the shelf for $20!
Naturally, we picked one up because an extruder head might make a nice accessory for our own three dimensional printer.
So, what is it? It’s an inexpensive kit that can be used for developing your 2D or 3D printer extruder with an air-powered delivery system. For the price you can get a small air pump, tubing, syringes, tips, and dispenser. The components are simple and easily hackable, and it looks like a good set of tools for starting to build a simple extruder head for an art bot of some sort.
Quite mysteriously, this kit is not actually advertised as an arbitrary material extruder kit, but rather as “the ultimate fabric painter.” This is very strange because not only does the kit not include any fabric paint, but it’s not obvious that there’s any advantage whatsoever to painting fabric with this method. (Actually, if the picture on the front of the box is any indication, there may even be disadvantages!)
Continue reading A $20 hackable extruder for your artbot or 3D printer
Duplex cookies bring a whole new level of literalness to the phrase “playing with your food.” These two-toned sandwich cookies beg to be used for board games such as Othello and checkers (or Go, if you have a lot of cookies). All you need are cookies, a large piece of paper and a pen.
We made a stop-motion video of a few minutes of playing games with the cookies, Check it out on youtube or watch it embedded here:
Last week we showed you how to make your own Meringue Chicks.
Since then, a few brave souls have tried it out and posted pictures of their own homemade Pseudo-Peeps. You can see some photos at
Assorted Notions and in the Recipe Maven community, who also show off some interesting meringue bunnies. Speaking of assorted meringue animals, we might have to make these silly snails next time.
It’s fairly off-topic, but while browsing pictures of Peeps on flickr this week, we also came across this reminder (NSFPL – not safe for peep lovers) of what’s in regular old peeps. We’ll stick to meringue, thanks.
[Related @ evilmadscientist: Pretzel Snails, Play with your food]
Tiramatzah is a tasty and seasonal variation on a classic dessert: tiramisu made with many layers of matzah bread. Because it’s made with many thin layers of matzah instead of just a couple of layers of ladyfingers, it develops a very interesting flaky and layered texture, much like the alternating custard and pastry layers of a Napoleon. Even so, it retains the distinctive flavor of tiramisu and is a darned sight easier to make than traditional pastries.
Dot wrote in with this photo of some beautiful dessert sushi that she made (link).
The “fish” pieces are primarily pieces of dried fruit– a brilliant (and healthier) alternative to our all candy version. She also included some tips for future sushi endeavors, all of which sound like good points:
Neat stuff– we’ll have to include dried papayas in our next batch of sushi!
[Related: Dessert Sushi]
