ChemBark

Outreach programs and other “broader impacts” are becoming increasingly important elements of NSF grant proposals.  I just wrapped up my first academic year of serving as an outreach mentor at a local high school, and it was a great experience.  The program is associated with the NSF Center at Caltech for Powering the Planet, and the gist of the work is that teams of students assemble scanning stations to screen metal-oxide semiconductors as catalysts for the photoelectrochemical splitting of water.

At the end of each school year, there is a big conference at Caltech where all of the students present their results.  In the planning of this year’s conference, I was somehow assigned the task of getting the dessert for the pre-symposium meal.  I am a big fan of commissioning customized ice-cream cakes, but this idea was quickly poo-pooed by the High Command.  Grudgingly forced to think of something else, I would later have what is surely the greatest idea of my scientific career: a periodic table of cupcakes.  Cupcakes!!  Each element would be represented by its own cupcake, and the groups would be colored-coded by frosting.

Cupcakes!!

Unfortunately, my initial excitement was quickly dampened by a Google search that revealed several previously published studies (1 2 3).  Taking a queue from modern synthetic organic chemistry, I decided to press on anyway.  The table comprised 83 cupcakes sorted as follows:

Elements  – Cake flavor/ Frosting

Alkali earth metals – strawberry / yellow  (7)
Alkaline earth metals – white / blue  (6)
Transition metals – chocolate / chocolate  (39)
P-block, below metalloid staircase – strawberry / red  (10)
P-block, above metalloid staircase – white / green  (15)
Noble gases – white / violet  (6)

So, obviously, I cheated a bit.  The lanthanides and actinides were each represented by a single cupcake.  Sorry.  For the record, the chocolate cupcakes were frosted with chocolate, while the rest of the cupcakes were frosted with the standard white/vanilla variety dyed with food coloring.  The elemental symbols were drawn in white icing.  The whole table cost about $75.

The project was well received, and it—without a doubt—represents the greatest culinary achievement of my life.  That said, do not expect a reprise anytime soon.  Baking and frosting almost a hundred cupcakes was time-consuming and monotonous.  The experience was also stressful…I purposely left everything to the last minute because I didn’t want the cupcakes to be stale.  If you want to undertake a similar adventure, my advice would be to cajole a friend into helping you.  Misery loves company.  Also, you can never buy enough of those 10-cm tubes of white icing for writing the letters; you’ll need six, at least.  Finally, even if you’re doing the baking at home, do the frosting at the party.  There is no easy way to transport 83 decorated cupcakes.  Believe me.

All photos courtesy of the talented Carolyn Patterson.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 10th, 2011 at 1:34 AM and is filed under Fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.