My biggest cake yet... Cruise Ship Cake

Last month, my sisters and I got to put together an over-the-top 60th birthday party for our parents. They love going on cruises, and unfortunately had to cancel their cruise reservation for this year (the first since Dad's original cancer diagnosis) because he was just diagnosed with the same cancer again. With a long road of of treatment ahead of them, we wanted to go all out and throw them a birthday party to remember. To make a long story short, the party was a huge success, and was full of the artistic touches that my family is known for. My main contribution was this nearly 3-foot long cruise ship cake:

The Plan:

I wanted to make a relatively long cake to best represent a typical cruise ship, and have multiple decks. I figured the simplest way to get this shape would be to make 3 9x13 cakes, and cut them down the middle, giving me several 4 1/2" wide cakes which I could cut and stack. I've only worked with fondant once before, and I wasn't that impressed with it, so I wanted to focus on a better tasting cake and use regular frosting instead. This would make it a bit more difficult to make the necessary details to make it look enough like a cruise ship. So I set out to make some good windows...

Windows:

I didn't want to pipe out frosting windows. The idea seemed too tedious and labor intensive, especially since I'd be building the cake the day of the party. I also didn't want a bunch of frosted windows because they would look inconsistent in size and shape. This led me to the idea of making square windows out of white chocolate, colored blue. I did some experimentation ahead of time to get it right, and they turned out great. I melted white chocolate slowly in a double boiler setup, and colored it blue with food coloring. Once it was colored well enough, I poured it out on some wax paper on a cookie sheet, and layered another piece of wax paper on top. At this point I spread out the melted chocolate to an even thickness and put it in the fridge to chill and harden.

Cutting proved to be tricky. You can't just cut all the way through with a knife, otherwise it cracks and breaks in unpredictable ways. What worked best was to score the surface of the chocolate sheet, and then break it along the score-line. This method let me easily break it down into even strips, and then squares. This of course produced a number of irregular pieces which made for some good snacking.

In the end I made a couple hundred little blue windows and kept them in the freezer to prevent any melting or sticking together.

Baking:

I took the cheap and easy route for the cake itself... boxed cake mix and jar frosting. Both of which came from Aldi at a great price and were much tastier than I had originally expected. I went off of Wilton's cake batter recommendations, which said a 9x13 wedding cake should be made with 7 cups of batter (about 1.5 boxes of mix for each). Each cake was baked at 350 F for 35-40 minutes. The biggest thing I learned was how to properly flour a pan. I came across a youtube instructional video that recommended putting a sheet of parchment paper (also greased & floured) in the bottom of the pan. This makes it MUCH easier to remove from the pan. I tried once without this parchment paper bottom layer, and ruined a cake trying to get it out of the pan.

Assembly:

I planned out the design and so I knew how long the cake would be, and cut a plywood board a little larger. This was then wrapped in blue paper from the craft store to serve as my cake board. The first layer was laid out with wax paper strips underneath the edges (to protect the cake board and keep it clean). Between each layer was a mixture of chocolate and white frosting. This was chosen so it would resemble the wood floors on each deck. Mixing chocolate and white frosting is also an easy way to get light brown.

Decorating:

When I started the assembly my cakes were nearly frozen, but eventually warmed up. This made frosting a bit difficult toward the end. I got most of the outside done with a frosting spreader, but had to finish up by piping it on, otherwise the blade would pull off bits of cake and it wouldn't stick.

Last but not least I stuck on the windows, which really made the cake look like a cruise ship, and added a fun chocolate touch to each piece. This was fun to build, and even better to eat.

Best of all, it tasted great, and looked good surrounded by more of our fancy buffet.

Happy Birthday Mom & Dad!

The Many Reconstructive Surgeries of Bobbleheads

Over the last couple months, our 2-year-old son Nathan has found his favorite new toys (and latest obsession) in the unlikely location of our Twins memorabilia shelf. He took a liking to our MN Twins Bobbleheads, although most of them aren't playing for the Twins anymore. We have Delmon Young, Joe Mauer, Torii Hunter, Joe Nathan, Brad Radke, Justin Morneau, and a small Ron Gardenhire figure that walks when you wind him up. We started lifting up Nathan to the height of the shelf and teaching him the names of each one, which he quickly picked up and could recite them in full to anyone who asked. Eventually we let him get them down and play with them. We like our bobbleheads, but we're no so attached to them that would deny our son the fun of playing with them.

Watching him play with the bobbleheads has been a constant source of entertainment and smiles. He brings them everywhere in the house. He'll stand them in a line in the laundry room, the bathroom, living room, kitchen, dad's workbench, and anywhere else he happens to be. He examines them with his doctor kit. He knows which ones are smiling, and he knows what each one is holding/doing (without looking). He sets them up on the dining room table so they can watch him eat his meals, and he lays them down for naps before he goes down for his own. It's ridiculously cute. To top it off, they seem to act as his conscience, and remember the rules of the house when he cannot. Lately his favorite is Delmon Young. Nathan tells us things like "Delmon Young says not to throw my fork on the floor" and "Delmon Young says don't bother the baby." Of course, you listen to him Nathan.

Knowing our son, we knew he would be careful with them (and he is), but accidents were bound to happen eventually. Joe Nathan's and Brad Radke's heads have come loose, which were easily fixed by re-gluing the spring to the head/body with some good epoxy. That was easy.

Then Delmon Young hit the tile floor. Twice.

The first injury was a decapitation at the base of the neck. While some glue might have held it, it was a spot that would be put under stress regularly and could easily break again. More drastic measures were required. This called for some bobblehead spinal fusion surgery.

Luckily the plastic was hard but wasn't too difficult to drill. I drilled a hole down into the torso and used epoxy to set in the shaft of a screw to act as reinforcement. Then I drilled a larger hole in the neck to give me some room for proper alignment, and filled the cavity with epoxy. Overall I'd say it came together fairly well and should hold strong.

About this time I was feeling pretty proud of my skills as bobblehead repair man and Dad. Delmon's body would sit on the workbench for awhile to let the epoxy properly cure. During this time Nathan was very concerned about Delmon and sad that he was missing from the lineup. We had to go down and check up on him regularly. He felt much better when we let him take care of Delmon's head while the body was under repair. Here's Nathan enjoying a morning snack with Delmon's head:

Sadly, tragedy struck the bobble-Delmon again before he could be put back together completely. Delmon's head fell off a table in the basement, hit the tile floor, and broke open.

This was when I learned the head itself was hollow, and rather thin in some spots. Nathan was devastated, and looked to me with "Daddy fix it" coming out of his mouth as it had so many times before. Challenge accepted.

Knowing how thin the head was, I wasn't comfortable leaving it empty. I wanted to reinforce it so it would hold up better going forward. I proceeded to superglue the big piece back on, and placed it in a small vise to hold it together while I filled the cavity with spray foam. I left the small pieces out so the foam could expand until it dried. This is how Delmon looked for at least a day:

This photo was taken on my workbench the night I started the cranial reconstruction. The next day Nathan wanted to go check on Delmon as soon as we got him out of his crib. He spent the rest of the day up on the mantle in the living room so Nathan could keep an eye on him. All day he would point up to Delmon's foam-extruding head and say things like "I just want to give Delmon a hug" or "when Delmon be all fixed, then I can play with him." Sure thing kiddo, I'll do whatever I can for you (and Delmon).

Tonight I cut away the excess foam, and trimmed back some of the plastic to get everything to fit. The fit wasn't as perfect as when it originally broke. Adding foam, glue, and epoxy kind of messed up the fit, but I think I got everything to come together fairly well. After my work tonight, here's how he looks now, happily bobbling away with his newly reinforced neck and head, ready to play some baseball. I made sure to get photographic evidence of him fully assembled and unbroken, as it may not last forever.

Tomorrow morning Delmon will rejoin his teammates (currently lined up on the Piano in our living room) for more adventures with our son around the house. I like projects & handyman challenges, and I love to make my kids happy. Thanks Nathan. Take care of the guys, I'd hate to see you have to lose one if he got damaged beyond repair.

New Job & Life Downtown

Today marks my first month at my new job. I recently made a career change, moving from a high-level software support role into a software development role. I am now working in an applications development team at a large law firm in downtown Minneapolis. Thus far the job is going very well. I'm enjoying the work, and getting to know my new team. I gained some great experience and worked with some great people at my last job, but I'm looking forward to new challenges and opportunities going forward in my new role.

Probably the biggest change I've experienced is the change in the environment, going from a small office in an industrial district to a high-rise in the middle of downtown Minneapolis.

Parking downtown can get expensive quickly, so I've been taking the bus to and from work. This has worked out very well, as the bus stop is less than 2 blocks from our house, so I don't have to drive anywhere, and drops me off a block from my building. Since we're fairly close to the freeway, it usually only takes 15 minutes each way. My employer lets me get a Metropass paid for with pre-tax dollars out of my paycheck, which is an added bonus. Overall this works out to be much cheaper than driving in, and best of all I don't have to worry about driving and traffic. This will be especially nice now, going into the winter months. I typically put on my headphones for the trip and relax with my podcasts & audiobooks on the iPod. Sometimes I almost wish I had a longer bus ride so I could really get into reading or watching something for more than 15 minutes. All things considered, I don't think my transit situation could have worked out much better.

The Minneapolis skyway system has been fun to explore as well. The more I explore the skyways on my lunch breaks, the more I can appreciate the 7-mile system of corridors connecting downtown. I'm still impressed with how busy the skyways get, seeing thousands of people milling about each day. I can find just about any restaurant or store I need, and I don't need to go outside. This means I don't have to put on warm clothes, wait for traffic lights, deal with the elements, or anything like that. I also find that I'm just walking more as a result, whether I'm running errands to Target or just going for a walk. It's nice to know that if I want to get away for my lunch break that I have more options than just going to eat in my car. When I leave the skyway system to go back to work, I zip up my elevator and head back to the office. I love the view of downtown from the high-rise.

So, the first month has gone well, and I'm looking forward to the months (and years?) to come!

Dad's Latest Cakes - Cross & Curious George

I thought I should take a moment to show off the latest cake creations of 2011 from Dad's cake shop. Partially because I'm proud of how they turned out, but also to show how simple they really were, and maybe help somebody else do the same.

Cross Cake

The first project was a basic cross-shaped cake for our youngest son's baptism. This was made from a basic 9x13 cake. The shape of the 9x13 pan lends itself well to this design. As shown in the pictures below, you can cut out the corners of the cake and they stack up to make a second layer of the cross. Essentially you make the cuts as if the cake were divided up into a 3 by 4 grid.



One thing I learned with this cake was the trouble of putting white frosting on a chocolate cake. Even though I froze the cake, I still had a large number of crumbs come off in the frosting process. I ended up having to chill and re-frost another layer to get a nice white exterior. This was also due to the fact that I used a cream cheese frosting, which is pretty thick. While tasty, the extra frosting was almost too thick for my taste. Overall the cake still got good reviews.

Curious George

Our older son loves Curious George, so when his 2nd birthday came around it was easy to pick a theme... Curious George! The cake design was inspired by ones I had seen through some Google image searches. The cake is made up of 2 round cakes stacked, and the ears were made by baking some cake batter in a muffin pan. The muffin was cut in half to produce each ear.



Frosting was done with some basic jar-frosting, using chocolate for the darker brown, and a mix of chocolate and white frosting for the lighter brown. The eyes were frosted with white frosting as well. I happened to have some black coloring, which I added to the chocolate frosting for piping the dark lines. Overall I was pleasantly surprised with how easily this one came together, and how good it turned out. Best of all, our son liked his Curious George cake, and our guests ate it up!

and so ends the Summer of Tile

I'm happy to report that as of a few weeks ago the tile work is finally finished in our basement. After last summer's water damage we had to pull out the carpet and some of the sheetrock, and we left it open for the winter and spring to make sure we had the water issues taken care of. Lucky for us the new gutters and the landscape fixes worked. We did have a little water get pushed up through the floor after a heavy rainstorm, most likely as a result of all the clay around here and hydrostatic pressure. Since we can't completely rule out the possibility of water in the future, we figured tiling the entire basement was the best idea, labor intensive though it may be.

After 3 months of nights & weekends, 510 sq feet, and over 2000 pounds of tile, it's finally done.

To keep the basement from feeling too hard & cold, we found some simple carpet rugs to use in the family room. This helps keep the space comfortable, and makes it easy to take care of in the event we get water in there again. I'd say it turned out really well.

Here are a few progress photos taken along the way:



And here is the finished product. Nathan really loves all the new play space!

Welcome Andrew James

Just wanted to take a moment to welcome my new son, Andrew James into the world - or at least the world of my blog. Andrew was born just over a week ago on Friday August 12th, 2011, at 6:59 pm. He weighed in at 7lbs 5oz and was 21 inches long. Overall he's very healthy and doing well in every aspect.

The past week has been a busy one, bouncing back and forth between the hospital for my wife & newborn son, and back home to spend time with Nathan and sleep in my own bed. We came home from the hospital on Sunday and introduced Nathan to his new little brother. Thanks in part to our work preparing Nathan for a new baby, he took to Andrew very well. Nathan loves to say hi to Andrew, urges his mother to "feed the baby" more often than necessary, and has been known to get upset if he can't see Andrew well enough from time to time.

Thus far Andrew has been a great baby. He rarely cries, only if he gets really hungry or needs a change, and he's been sleeping well at night between feedings. We thought we lucked out with Nathan being a good baby, and I think we lucked out even more with Andrew. I'm sure some of the ease is due to the fact that we've done this all before, and we're pretty easy-going parents. Either way, in the short week he's been with us, I think we've all adjusted to being a family of four fairly well.

I took two weeks vacation from work, and the first week has flown by already. One more week to go and we'll step back into real life. Although judging by our first week together, I think we'll be alright.

Now I'm looking forward to raising my two boys to be happy healthy and well-adjusted young men. Not sure yet how exactly I might accomplish that but I'll do my best, and if nothing else try to set a good example.

Fabrication brings TinyChuck5 to life

After some time spent re-acquainting myself with circuit board manufacturing and laser cutting, my "TinyChuck5" project is complete, looking more like a finished product than a breadboarded mess of wires. Here it is, happily blinking away:



At the time of my last post, I had finished my circuit board design and had some boards on order. The circuit boards were manufactured overseas through the Seeedstudio Fusion PCB service, great for small prototyping runs of small boards. Thankfully my design just barely fit within the 5cm x 5cm maximum size. To get 10 boards for only $20 is a steal, much cheaper than just one board through most other services. They also have a 10cm x 10cm option for $40. Despite the low price, the boards turned out quite well, the only drawback being the long lead time. They also added some identification/serial numbers to the silkscreen on each board to keep track of the order, but that's hardly anything to be concerned over. I also ended up with some additional boards, 12 in all, with 8 of them tested (they promise at least 50% testing, 100% costs extra). All in all a perfect service for the hobbyist engineer.

With boards in hand, I headed for the workbench to assemble my first prototype. After much soldering and clipping of leads, it was time for the ultimate test... would it work? Was my circuit board designed correctly? With the programmed chip pressed into its socket I hooked up power through a couple alligator clips and viola! It worked! Blinking lights! Not terribly exciting I know, but it was personal validation for the work and attention to detail I had put into my little trinket.

Next step was to give this little piece of electronics a proper enclosure. I wanted to have it set up on my desk and look nice & clean. While the exposed electronics look was interesting in its own right, I wanted to take it up a notch.

Years ago, I was fortunate enough to have access to a laser cutter/engraver in my high school's metal shop, and I was appointed to be the resident expert and operator of the machine. I learned a lot that year and had fun cutting and engraving all sorts of parts and materials. Having access to that kind of creativity-driven hardware was a lot of fun. So when it came time to make an enclosure for this project, I wanted to laser cut something. Thanks to their partnership with SparkFun Electronics, I found out about a company called Ponoko, an internet-based "digital manufacturing" service that creates parts from digital files. 2-dimensional designs can be cut from a variety of materials, and 3D designs can be turned into physical parts using 3D printing technologies. They make it easy and affordable. In college I also got to use the rapid prototyping machine to "print" 3D objects, but that's a different story. Needless to say I love the whole digital fabrication concept, and the creative freedom it enables.

For laser cut parts, I simply had to upload my design as an SVG file, and choose the material I wanted. I opted to do my design work in AutoCAD where I feel most comfortable, having made mechanical drawings in the software for four years at college. I saved my design to an AutoCAD R13 DXF format, imported it into Inkscape, placed it within Ponoko's design template, and sent the design off to Ponoko to be cut from 3mm thick white acrylic plastic. Some time later the parts arrived at my door, and it was back to the workbench.



One thing I noticed after assembling my first unit was that my LEDs didn't all line up perfectly in their 4 x 5 grid. The holes in the PCB were bigger than the LED leads, so each LED had some wiggle room. This resulted in a few LEDs that looked "off" from the rest of their respective rows. I had some space available on my Ponoko design, so I had them cut me a template for placing my LEDs. I cut holes for each LED just big enough to fit the lens, and included mounting holes that lined up with the circuit board. This let me place all 20 LEDs in a near-perfect grid and hold them solid while I soldered each one. The results look much better than my first attempt, with perfectly aligned rows & columns of lights.

With soldering complete, I began assembling the new enclosure:



Here's a view of the back of the unit. The back piece included cutouts for my power cord (a USB cable), and for a small T-shaped button I made for pressing the reset button inside on the circuit board.



And here again is the finished product. These days it sits on my desk at work, quietly blinking away, occasionally drawing me into a hypnotic zen-state, and serving as inspiration for my next more ambitious project.