Baking Experiment: Veganity

Working in a building featuring several awesome vegans, it always pains me when I've baked stuff that I can't offer them one. I finally got round to looking up a vegan cake recipe, and was surprised to discover that the basic vegan cake recipe is pretty simple: water, oil, sugar and flour. This shouldn't really surprise me, since I'm sure there's an equivalent basic recipe for non-vegan cakes, but the idea that you can start from this intrigued me, and my initial thoughts were along the lines of messing with this basic premise.

This of course led to a baking experiment, and the questions which the experiment aimed to answer were:

• Does using vegetable oil based non-dairy spread work as a substitute for oil?
• What things can you add to it to make the cakes nicer?
• Can I swap the water out for other liquids?

These questions were all answered by the massive variety of vegan cakes I baked over the course of an enjoyable afternoon with a few friends round. We made some cakes using Vitalite instead of oil, we added frozen fruit, cocoa powder, walnuts, vanilla, dried cranberries, food colouring, and in a bout of awesomeness, swapped water out for fruit juice or Vimto.

The results of these many varied combinations of things are pictured below (click to enlarge). The Vitalite cakes are the ones in yellow cases (bottom right photo).

We also made a loaf tin cake in which we put mashed banana and walnuts, and I think the texture of that came out the nicest, although it was structurally not very good at staying in one piece (the top came off when I tried to get it out of the tin) and so we cut it up and put portions in individual muffin cases.

The Vimto buns with raspberries, and the grape juice with dried cranberry buns both didn't rise as well as the others, so there's a lesson for you - although I have yet to taste one, and it may be that they taste nice. Or not.

In general, it seems vegan cakes don't necessarily rise as well as regular cakes, in the absence of dairy and eggs (apparently the banana does quite well as an egg substitute, explaining the awesomeness of the banana loaf) and a lot of the crazy vegan cake recipes you see which have vinegar and all sorts in are basically designed to get them to rise better. The buns mostly rose a satisfactory amount, so I'm happy to stick to this simple recipe. Plus, I get lots of vegan points.

Robot Sunday: A robot that flies like a bird

I've only vaguely heard of TED talks before, and I was vaguely aware that they are from the TED (Technology, Engineering, Design) conference. It turns out that the conference is a massive hub for amazing intelligent people giving really interesting talks, and all of the talks have been put online for the edification and enjoyment of everyone. The length of TED talks is also limited, so that you can communicate your ideas but not waffle on and bore people. This is a concept I can fully get behind.

Speaking of concepts I can really get behind, this TED talk amazingly features SmartBird, a robot that flies like a bird. A team from Festo have replicated the motion of a bird, and produced a lightweight powerful robot imitating a herring gull, which can actually fly like a bird. If you want to see the bird flying, skip the video to around 2:00, after which you can see Markus Fischer explain the inner workings of the robot. And then wish with all your heart that you can go to next year's TED conference, because that is literally the kind of thing that goes on there.

Robot Sunday - Robot World Cup

Just in case you thought there was no real incentive to develop robot technology (there clearly is: it is that robots are fricking awesome), a fantastic example can be found in the robot world cup. Called RoboCup, it was established in 1997 and provides an annual competition for people who design and make robots to compete in several categories. The most obviously awesome aspect of this is that of designing robots which are capable of playing football (that's soccer, to anyone who is from places where football is called soccer and American football is called football).

I think it's a great way to encourage development of new robots. It has categories for different sizes and styles of robot, but the rules state they can't be remote controlled (this isn't Robot Wars, people) - the robots must contain AI and decide for themselves what to do. They communicate with each other using wireless (WLAN), and work as a team. Last year's RoboCup Soccer tournament was won by teams from Germany and Singapore. Even though there is a category for full-size humanoid robots, there's some way to go before they would be capable of taking on an actual human team. Even one which is really rubbish. Insert catty football remark here.

The 2011 RoboCup took place earlier this month in Istanbul, and featured categories other than soccer, including robots for use around the home, and robots for rescue purposes.

More information, and some cool videos of the action, can be found on Wikipedia, on the RoboCup Wiki, the 2011 RoboCup homepage, and at www.RoboCup.org.

Another baking experiment

So, this is a writeup of a cake-based experiment which now took place sufficiently long ago that I've almost completely forgotten about it, so if this writeup seems hazy on the details, that's why. The idea was to find the optimal combination of flake type, covering type and bit size for a chocolate/otherwise cornflake/otherwise cake. The combinations on trial were as follows:

• Milk chocolate, white chocolate, or melted marshmallow
• Corn flakes or bran flakes (bear with me)
• Full size flakes, or crushed up flakes.

The theory is that a) I've seen all three types of coating employed with almost unilateral success, b) bran flakes work REALLY well, since they're naturally sweet and it's a good way to hide fibre in your diet, and c) crushing up the corn flakes should in theory mean there's a higher chocolate to flake ratio, making the cakes chocolatier, which in truth can only be a good thing.

Overall the baking went well, and I was ably assisted by two other people,

who I'm sure wouldn't like to have their names associated with cookery on the internet. We had a great time crushing up cornflakes - I discovered the optimal implement to be the flat bottom of a wooden egg cup, but the end of a rolling pin came in second.

We then discovered that we'd prepared far too much cornflakes for the amount of chocolate we had. We pressed on regardless, and in retrospect probably should have put some of them back in the box. We'll do that next time - readers, I'm making mistakes here so you don't have to.

The next major discovery we made, apart from how awesome I am at making a Bain-Marie out of a bowl and a pan (skills I learned from my Mum; you never forget these kinds of things) was that marshmallow, when melted, goes FRICKING WEIRD. It becomes very sticky, and incredibly stringy, resisting all attempts to 1: transfer it from the container it's in to somewhere else and 2: mix with other substances easily. We eventually somehow subdued it enough to make it stick to some cereal products and stay in paper cases.

Overall, we basically ended up with a FRICKING SHEDLOAD of cereal based coated cake products, and kudos to the people of my immediate friends and the maths department for helping me to eat them all.

The conclusions we drew from the experiment were four-fold:

1. All of the cakes were pretty nice.
2. We could have done with more chocolate, or less cereal.
3. People avoided the bran flake ones, but when they did eat them, thought they were pretty nice.
4. Crushing up would be quite effective at making them stay together better, IF we'd used more chocolate. Which we didn't. So they crumbled everywhere.

Watch this space for further caking exploits, especially since I'm due to submit my corrections soon, at which point I'll have a LOT more free time (and thus will presumably start mucking around with baking again).

Stories worth telling are... worth a few dollars, surely?

I love being a mathematician for so many reasons, and one of them is because I find mathematics interesting, not just as a subject, but as a culture. People working within maths have proven themselves to be awesome, terrifying, unbelievably nerdy, creative, interesting, tedious and wonderful in equal parts.

For this reason, I'd be very interested to hear the results of Samuel Hansen's new project - he's planning to create a series of audio shows/podcasts which document stories from the world of mathematics. It's called Relatively Prime: Stories from the Mathematical Domain, and will make use of his existing skills in creating podcasts (as evidenced by his many many existing maths news and interview podcasts, some of which I listen to on a regular basis) and enthusiasm for the subject.

Samuel lives in Las Vegas, but I met him when he was over for the MathsJam conference last November, and it's impossible not to notice his obsession with maths and maths communication. Yes, that is a photo of him up there, stood next to some maths, just to prove his maths credentials. He has recently graduated from the University of Nevada, where he specialised in graph theory, the funnest of all the theories.

He's hoping to work on the series over the next year, and to help him fund this project, he's got a Kickstarter page on which you can pledge money to him. He needs to raise $8000 by 3rd August, and I'd recommend that if you can spare any money (even just $20, which is less than £20) you should pledge it. He even has cool rewards for people donating increasing amounts of money, including producer credits and your chance to do a voice over. I would really love to see this project happen, so head over and check out his video at least.

(Incidentally, if anyone was wondering why this blog post didn't contain any references to either robots or baked goods, your regular fix can be found here and here).

UPDATE: Samuel's Kickstarter has been funded! Watch this space (or more realistically, my twitter) for news of when his first show is out.