Academic Geekcake: The wonders of Chemistry

Lori over at the Clever Cake Studio blog, loves to experiment with the art of cake making:

"Since March 2008, I've been doing a cake almost every week to practice, learn, cry, recover, learn more, and make local supply shops rich. Here you'll find the results of each week's cake project as my little portfolio builds. Share in my relief and amazement each time a cake works out, and witness just how damn clever I have to force myself to be if things don't quite go as planned. "




Lori goes into detail on the cake creation:


"The book is supposed to be reminiscent of the CRC Handbook for Chem and Physics (87th Edition). It is for the birthday of an awesome chemical engineer at Nintendo.It’s made with white cake and chocolate filling. The red Erlenmeyer flash is raspberry with some raspberry liquor in the cake and preserves between the layers. The yellow acid bottle is, naturally, lemon cake with lemon curd filling. They are all covered in buttercream and fondant, and yes, the stopper in the acid bottle is a separate piece and can be lifted out."

Be sure to check out Lori's full gallery here, for plenty more fantastic (though not necessarily geeky) cakes.

I wish more cakes referenced textbook editions as inspiration. A true academia geekcake. Sounds delicious too.

See you Wednesday.

Annakin Lego Minifig GIANT geekcake

A quick one tonight.

Geeks seem to love Lego. I think it's the building combination possibilities.

Geeks feel passionate about the Star Wars universe. Even if you don't love it , I know, that you know, a geek who does.

So it is with great pleasure I present to you a giant, geekcake, Lego minifig, Chocolate, Anakin!



Original source is over at the Gamespot blog.

Apparently the entire thing is only chocolate cake and icing (excluding the lightsaber).

Whomever it was made for is one mighty luckiy eight year old !

See you Friday !

xkcd on a cake! xkcd geekcake!

Ahh, the humble web-comic. Although some are geekier than others, anyone who spends any significant amount of time online has a favourite one.

According to Wikipeda, the medium has only been around since the late 1980's. I'm not so sure about that, but I do know that one of the most fondly regarded web-comics currently in existence is (probably) xkcd.

It's uber geek (and proud of it), and mixes biting sarcasm with multi layered humour about high level maths, academia, physics, all thinks geek, and the authors musings on life, love and what it is to be human.

As you may have gathered I'm a little bit of a fan.

So I was delighted when I stumbled across a gorgeously iced xkcd cake which recreated an entire comic, over at the Google-centric blog Googlified.

Unfortunately this is the biggest picture I can find. Original comic link here:

[If you have any more info, about the creation of this iced gem, please do drop me an email at my gmail address]

That's it for tonight. See you Wednesday !

Come to the Darkside, we have CAKE! Darth Vader Geekcake!

I have featured Star Wars Geekcake creations before. Star Wars themed cakes and Dr Who themed cakes are probably the most popular geekcake creations.

The ultimate villain of the Star Wars universe is Darth Vader. The original Trilogy made his ultimate evil very clear. The 'Prequel trilogies' muddied the moral waters a little - Darth Vader as sympathetic character doesn't work for me but I admit it is utterly subjective. Your mileage may vary.

What I do know for sure is that I can't find any Annakin Skywalker cakes, but I can find Darth Vader cakes aplenty!

So here, are four of the best Vader cakes I have found to date.

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Over at carolynssweettooth site, is this marvellous piped icing rendition of Vader. Unfortunately I don't have any creation details.

Original source here.

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Discovered on Flickr, Jen of Jen's Creations shared her black and red icing version of Vader.



Unfortunately I do not have any creation details for this one either, but it sure looks tasty to me!

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An entirely different Jen over at Layersoflove.com, created this buttercream tribute to Lord Vader:

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And finally (again over at Flickr) we have Vader atop a flaming platform of icing:



Jane BK describes a little bit behind the creation of the fiery set piece:
Chocolate buttermilk cake with chocolate SMBC filling and covered in fondant. Darth is just regular fondant/gum-tex modeling paste.

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See you Monday!

Gingerbread Chevrons? Stargate geekcake!

Spanning 10 seasons, from 1997 until 2007, and with a total of 213 episodes, AND three spinoff series, (Atlantis, Infinity, and Universe) AND  three direct to DVD features, it's difficult to argue against the success of the Stargate meta-verse. A certain generation of fans, may always associate  Richard Dean Anderson with MacGyverr, but his turn as Jack O'Neill, might just eclipse that.

Being a huge Stargate and RDA fan, the talented Polly Hawthorn (whom you might remember from Monday's post) decided to recreate the SG:1 team .. in gingerbread!  Polly calls her creation: 'The Starcake and SG:1(Special Gingerbread 1)' 

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The base of each character is a gingerbread cookie, painted with icing of various colours and combined with a "few bits of fondant for the decorations on the uniforms and faces"

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Polly explains how the actual Stargate section was created: " ..,  was constructed like a cookie, I baked two halves then glued it together with icing and cut out small pieces for the gate chevrons then I used orange jelly icing left over from a dalek cookie kit and some gummy sweets cut to fit for the orange crystals. The centre of the Starcake is tinfoil over a circle of card. "

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Doesn't it look HUGE? I wonder how tall that stargate was...?

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That's all for tonight folks, see you Friday!

Do you know what this is? This is a dinosaur egg. The dinosaurs are breeding. Jurrasic Park geekcake.

I recently received an email from a very talented baker called Polly Hawcroft (aka PJ) who lives in London.

She sent me pictures of three of her current creations, two of which I shall share with you today.

Polly's mere description of the first cake makes me hungry..:

The Jurassic Park logo cake was something I made for a JP themed party I had to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the film's release in 2003 (can you tell I dig dinosaurs?). I christened it 'The Chaos Theory Cake' because it was a choc fudge cake, with buttercream in the centre which was also jam packed with all sorts of random jelly sweets and pick and mix. Then the whole thing was covered with ganache and then I made the fondant logo for the top, it was a bit wide and had to be supported by cocktail sticks! But, it was most delicious.




Hmmmm. Buttercream plus chocolate equals double tasty !

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But, not to stop at one magnificant creation, Polly then went on to also recreate the Jurrasic park jeep:



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Side

In her email, Polly very helpfully outlined the creation of the Jeep:

The Jurassic Park Jeep was a basic choc sponge covered in fondant with decals that I printed onto rice paper using my inkjet...yup I was amazed it worked too though I'm not sure they were strictly edible they looked good! It wasn't the tastiest sponge I ever made but it looked damn spectacular.

Damn spectacular indeed! Those Liquorice wheels look good enough to out-run a confectionery T-Rex to me!

See you Wednesday, where I shall be showcasing another of Polly's creations !

Apologies and technical difficulties... missing posts last week

Dear reader I apologise.

Last week Wednesday and Friday, where there should have been geekcake posts, there were none.

I trusted that Bloggers 'schedule' post ability would work as described.

That'll teach me.

Still I believe I've fixed the issue now, and tonight's post *should* come off without a hitch.

Monday's post to follow in mere minutes....