adventures in science & cooking {cameraphone pic of the day}

Molten chocolate cake, super easy and delicious even at 10 a.m., especially with homemade coffee and vanilla ice cream on the side (the TFs made the ice cream using the traditional salt and ice freezing method and also demonstrated how to freeze ice cream with super cold liquid nitrogen, which reduced “cooking” time from 1.5 hrs to just 10 minutes!)

One of the tastier experiments on the syllabus, this lab demonstrated the concept of heat distribution in cooking by having us observe the relationship between temperature, time, and degree of doneness. I always thought you had to inject chocolate into cooked cakes to get the molten center, but actually it’s much simpler than that - you just cook the batter until the outside is cooked and solidified but the inside is still liquid (which happens because it takes longer for heat to get to the middle than the outside).