We are in the thick of birthday season at out house, so that means lots of birthday cake.  My wife recently took a cake decorating class AND we’ve been watching the first season of Cake Boss on Netflicks streaming, so we decided to team up and tackle a cake.  By some strange coincidence, my kids have become fans of Star Wars.  So we decided to make a cake of Clone Captain Rex’s Helmet.

We started by looking at the overall height and size of the helmet and discovered that we didn’t have any cake pans that would work.

My wife came upon the idea of using one of the #10 cans from our food storage to bake the cake.  The can is about 6″ in diameter by 7″ tall, and it worked pretty good to put a whole cake mix in.

She greased the inside of the can and then coated it with flour to help it release from the can after it was completely cooled.  One of the problems was that the cake took awhile to bake because it was so thick.

This made the cake come out pretty dense, but that helped with the carving.  She used a cake leveler to slice the cake into the 5 layers we needed and then staked them with chocolate frosting in-between each layer.  Then I carved out the basic dome of the helmet.

I wasn’t thinking about documenting this whole build until after the fact, so I’m sorry that I don’t have more photos in this section.  My wife smoothed the cake with the butter cream frosting and then rolled out a layer of fondant to cover it.  She colored some of fondant blue and yellow, then we bought the black fondant.  I cut out the visor shape while she cut strips of fondant and I put them on the cake.

It turned out pretty good for our first attempt at this cake sculpture stuff.  Even if the thing looked terrible, you can still eat it!

And the boy loved it!  :D

Associate professor of the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California Berkeley Daniel Fletcher posed a challenge to his students.He said to imagine working in a remote African village at the time of a disease outbreak, and that all they have at their disposal is a camera cell phone and an assortment of basic optics lenses and mounts. He asked if it would it be possible to convert the camera phone into a sort of mobile microscope that could be used to diagnose the disease?

A small team of graduate, postdoctoral and undergraduate students has worked with Fletcher to refine their invention which they call CellScope.

In some sort of super powered Team up, the Wizards of Aardman Animation (Wallace & Gromit) are using the brand spanking new 8 megapixel Nokia N8 and the CellScope to create the animation below.

Here is a fabulous behind the scenes look at the creation of this World Record holding animaiton.