Karyotype Birthday Brownies

My sister, who you may recall was the mastermind behind a certain very famous birthday cake, made these equally nerdy birthday brownies for her friend:

My favorite piece is chromosome 23.  I’m just going to go ahead and place an order for one of these at my future baby shower.  Forget those lame diaper cakes; pregnant ladies need chocolate.

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Pi Day Pie Bake-Off

We at Foodie Friday celebrated 3/14 with an absolutely bitchin’ coconut cream pie, but we weren’t the only ones baking.  Serious Eats and ScienceBlogs co-hosted their 2nd annual Pi Day Pie Bake-Off on Sunday, and Claudette’s hundred-digit berry pie is far and away my favorite:

Check out the rest of the finalists and vote for your favorite at ScienceBlogs before Thursday.

Not So Humble Pie

Alex recently introduced me to Not So Humble Pie, a food blog featuring the most delightfully nerdy baked goods I’ve ever seen, with gorgeous photography.

Gel electrophoresis cookies

Binary code cupcakes

Game controller cookies

Mrs. Humble describes herself as “your typical  nerdy biological anthropologist turned stay at home mom and baker of sometimes strange goodies.”  Her posts are not all Xbox this and Wiimote that, however.  Some of my favorite posts of late include:

Chocolate mascarpone brownies

Macarons

Peanut brittle

Arancini

Not So Humble Pie makes me almost wish I was a stay at home mom with time to bake all day long.  Who’s up for making macarons?

This Was a Triumph

When it’s a CS major’s birthday, and you’re in charge of baking the cake, there’s really only one thing to do.

For you non-Northsiders, this is a birthday cake I made last weekend in replica of the (in)famous cake from Portal.  I’m not much of a gamer; my first (and last) game of Halo 2 ended prematurely when I chucked a grenade at a wall and then mashed buttons frantically in a futile attempt to run away just before it bounced back in my face and blew me up.

I have a special place in my heart for Portal, however, because it’s a first-person shooter but with puzzles and physics instead of blood and guts (mine).  You should really play it if you haven’t; it takes only about a day to finish, or a few hours if you are one of those people capable of running straight through a portal without smashing into the doorframe.

The excellent recipe is from arbitrarylogic at Instructables.  Protips: The amounts in the recipe are halved, so be sure to double them; you can trim the cake flat easily with dental floss; cut the chocolate with a sharp knife to make nice pieces rather than a grater or peeler; remember set aside a bit of your whipped cream at the end so that you don’t have to use a can like I did.  Special thanks to Bonnie and Kaushik for helping me put on the finishing touches!

Check out this combination Portal/Rickroll cake from Papersatan a few years back for a cake that really is a lie.  And, just to save you some time because you know you were going to go listen to it anyway:

Watchmen Cupcakes

We here at Foodie Friday have been excitedly tracking our 15 minutes of fame on Reddit tonight.  It’s awesome to see everyone’s appreciative comments of the periodic table cupcakes (and speculation about me being a bored housewife).

So you guys like nerdy cupcakes.  You want to see more nerdy cupcakes.  Okay.

Here are some that I made out of fondant for Watchmen.

Does lightning strike twice?  Regardless, thanks for all the periodic table love.

Periodic Table Cupcakes

Edit: Pictures of the Watchmen cupcakes are up for all you cupcake lovers over at Reddit.

I helped my little sister bake these periodic table cupcakes for her birthday party tomorrow.

She’s a chemistry nerd, so everything had to be exactly correct.  Astute chem majors will notice the color-coded icing for solids, liquids, and gases, as well as the empty cupcake liner for as-yet-undiscovered element ununseptium.

(Though when it came time for me to take a picture with the completed cupcakes, she mysteriously could not find her ultra-dorky safety goggles that I wanted to wear for it.)

By the time the flour from the day’s baking had settled, we had emptied 2 bags of powdered sugar, 1 bag of brown sugar, 1 bag of white sugar, 16 eggs, and and 17 sticks of butter.

Shoutouts to Ellie and Marissa for helping with the other metals, metalloids, and nonmetals, as well as to the best four elements on the table: Berkelium, Californium, Lawrencium, and Seaborgium.  Oh, what?  Stanfurdium?  What?  Oh, sorry, there isn’t one.  Boom.