I Vomit Rainbows

Every so often, I’ll hear about someone who doesn’t know who the Flying Spaghetti Monster is, and it makes me sad. It also makes baby Jesus cry. Flying Spaghetti Monster is the awesomest diety out there. He’s made of pasta and full of noodly goodness. He created Earth after drinking a lot. The Pope even likes the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The religion behind the Flying Spaghetti Monster was created in 2005 as an argument against the teaching of intelligent design in schools as an alternate to evolution. It was presented to the Kansas Board of Education. It became an internet meme.. and now appears in cupcake form (for Paul’s birthday). I made these last February and forgot to post about them.

Noodles = frosting
Meatballs =  hazelnut candies
Eyes = bits of Pocky mounted to chocolate chips
Marinara = strawberry jam mixed with thawed frozen strawberries
Stalks = Pocky (original flavor)
Cheese = shredded white chocolate chips
Cupcake base flavor = vanilla.

(Above: Rickmond and Paul enjoy FSM cupcakes at The Rustic Spoon)

Chris (cnelson) showed me a video about augmented reality cookies, and I knew that had to be the next baking project. The premise behind this is to hold a cookie with a special mark on it, and a webcam would render a shape over the cookie, even if you rotated it. We were going to make it so that when you bit into a cookie, you’d get a silly mustache on your face.

Of course, I waited til last minute to make the dough, and was trying to measure out 1cm tall chunks at 2am. But the bigger problem was that the dough was defrosting fast as I was trying to build the cookies, and I was worried that it wouldn’t be smooth enough to scan.

But the cookie block did look fine the next day, and sliced easily. We laid them onto cookie sheets and baked them. In Chris’s sunny computer room, they did scan. However, the program was having problems with the contrast. Next time, add more blue and red food coloring, as well as more melted chocolate, to give your cookies more contrast.

Chris was in charge of making the code work with the cookies. He used Processing and NyARToolkit to make that happen.

I also made some onigiri rice balls with the trigger shape cut out, and some quick California rolls. The rolls didn’t trigger the software, but the riceballs did. We showcased these at Hacker Drinkup 100, at Rick’s Tavern.

I drew a bunch of mustaches that would display randomly. Here is what your options were:

Screenshots from Chris’s App: http://id.cnelson.org/augmented-stache

Eliot’s Blog Post: http://www.robotskirts.com/2010/05/27/augmented-reality-mustaches/

My Flickr Set of Hacker Drinkup 100: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinguino/sets/72157624155168304/

I think we’re a bit obsessed with augmented reality now, so expect more cool stuff from us soon!

Every year for our birthday, Dave and I throw a party called NinjaPenguin. This year was NinjaPenguin 4, held at the Good Nite Bar in North Hollywood. Every year, we do a crazy cake. The first year was a penguin. The second was  2girls1cup. The third was longcat. This year… we proudly introduce the META BAR. The Meta Bar is a 20,000 calorie candy bar made of every candy bar we could get our hands on.

Take all this candy. Seperate it into food groups. We did Nut, American, International, Fruit, and Meat.

Bake at 180 degrees (or whatever the lowest your oven goes) for like 30 mins til its all melty and fused. Leave in your fridge overnight. The chocolate won’t stick to the parchment paper. This is how it’ll look out of the oven:

Then make a wrapper using butcher paper, foil, and sharpies. This will also make transporting and showing off the candy bar easier.

We used a saw to cut it into pieces.

Here’s a cross section of the inside:

Overall, a successful kitchen experiment, and a memorable birthday cake!

Photos by Vissago. The rest of his awesome set, including the party trying out a bunch of KFC double downs, is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vissago/sets/72157623992971289/