Flavor of the Day: fu(ji)bar

This is a twist on my regular dough-while: a chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream with pecan pralines. (If you don't know what those are, imagine cooking pecans in butter and sugar until they are as fubar as the name of this ice cream.) This is a special 21st birthday creation for a girl who does not drink, but has an affinity for cookie dough and candied pecans.

Public Key Encryption, Biotch

While teaching CS to middle school girls this summer, I came to the fabulous realization that girls at this age will learn anything as long as you turn it into a competitive game. This allows them to take the full power of their fabulous teen-girl attitudes and apply it to learning computer science. It sounds unlikely, but it is miraculously so.

When we were teaching the different areas of cryptography, we played a game where each team would send a representative up to the buzzer, the teachers would read a scenario, and the representatives would ring the buzzer and state whether this scenario was an example of symmetric key encryption, public key encryption, digital signatures, or multi-party computation and give the reason why. In a beautiful moment of attitude, our most z-snapping girl faked a slap at a teammate after a wrong answer, shouting, "Oh my god, that was so public key encryption!"

I hope that in four years this generation of girls will be entering the field of CS at top schools all over the country, kicking ass and taking names in cryptography while wearing oversized hoop earrings.

America, the Nerdical

This was another forgotten ice cream adventure, and yet how could I have forgotten? This was not a flavor, but a cake, constructed by me and Jeremy for the 4th of July. And what I cake it was! It was probably the best thing I've eaten in my life. On the bottom was a large chocolate chip cookie. This was followed by homemade Vanilla Basic ice cream. On top of this was a layer of crush oreos, followed by C ice cream, then fresh whipped cream. Finally we made the traditional American flag out of strawberries and blueberries. Oh, the fireworks!

A Celebration of Nerdy Boys

A beautiful moment at Artemis this summer:

(Note: Artemis is the free computer science summer program at Brown for middle school girls, for which I was a coordinator this summer)

At the end of the program our students gave presentations to the faculty, staff and students of the CS department. I invited a number of my friends who were doing research here over the summer. My students knew that I had some pretty nerdy friends. One student with an especially powerful attitude asked if the people she saw standing around were my friends. I said that they were, and she uttered four very powerful words: "Nerds can be hot."

Flavor of the Day: C

Pure chocolate. Simple and unpretentious. Also pairs well with Bananas and ROM, probably because it's a low-level flavor.

Flavor of the Day: Bananas and ROM

Last night was the (first) cast party for Twelfth Night, and I created two flavors for our celebrations. We were all dancing in the overwhelming heat and humidity, and ice cream tasted amazing. My first flavor was this banana custard ice cream with a hint of rum. After GCD (ginger custard dessert), I'm really into custard ice creams. This is not surprising, considering they are even richer than normal ones. You heat the cream and milk and mix in egg yolks and sugar to form a custard before churning. Quite delicious.

Flavor of the Day: MSB: Melon Sorbet Bliss

This was my first attempt at a sorbet, and it was most delicious. The recipe was fascinating. The only ingredients were honeydew, sugar and white wine. I suppose the wine helps to inhibit the freezing so that the sorbet doesn't become one large popsicle. I wondered, however, whether you could get drunk off of sorbet. After all, normally food that contains wine is cooked but for this you only needed to heat the wine until all the sugar dissolved. Well, it certainly was interesting, but perhaps not my most significant bit of summer cooking as the name suggests.

Flavor of the Day: GCD: Ginger Custard Dessert

This is a ginger custard ice cream made with freshly grated ginger. Could Euclid taste it, he would be begging for the algorithm.

A Forgotten Flavor: ML

This flavor was created on July 3rd, but I somehow forgot to report it. When my friends have birthdays, I ask them to put in flavor requests. This flavor was a special birthday request for my friend ML-y. In a classic case of ML pattern-matching, I made her this delicious chocolate raspberry ice cream and a chocolate cake with fresh strawberries.

(chocolate, (_, berry))

How could I forget such a memorable creation? Well despite it's elegance, ML is often overlooked.

Flavor of the Day: The Greeny Approach

It's true, the greeny approach is not the best in most cases. But in ice cream, it is provably optimal. This is a green tea flavor, simple and elegant. And it runs out in O(1/n) time, where n is the number of spoons.

Flavor of the Day: Banana-ed

This flavor is for all those squatters of the Sunlab, those residents of Row Nine, those blameless computer science students who have been banana-ed. This is for the banana-ed, the perma-banana-ed, the banana-ed from banana-ing, and the banana-ed from being banana-ed. To you, my creatures of the CIT, I offer my take on the banana split: a strawberry-vanilla ice cream with fresh strawberries and bananas, pieces of home-made fudge, and a sprinkling of walnuts. I'll see you in TA camp.

Flavor of the day: chai-catch

All the flavor of a vanilla chai, with none of the danger of an uncaught exception. Won't you chai it?

Flavor of the Day: Mascarpwn

This is my greatest cream creation. Inspired by the Italian dessert, it is a mascarpone honey ice cream with fig jam and walnuts. Even the 1337-est ice cream connoisseurs have to admit: they have just been mascarpwned.

Feat of Nerdiness: Text on the Beach

Another reason I haven't written much lately is because I recently spent a week on the Outer Banks in North Carolina with my boyfriend and his family. They are a wonderfully nerdy family but they were still rather surprised by the book I had brought for some light beach reading. It was Michael Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation. In my defense, I told them that it was to prepare for the course I am to head-TA in the fall. Apparently, this is no excuse for mixing nondeterminism and sand into a delicious cocktail I call text on the beach.

Flavor of the Day: Dough-rie

This is another non-CS flavor (but don't despair! there is more CS to come). Dough-rie is a peanut-butter-chocolate-chip cookie dough flavor with a vanilla base. My friend came to visit me at Brown and wanted to try out my ice cream maker. Not only did we make a delectable doughy dessert, we also had enough dough left over for a batch of peanut-butter cookies.

Flavor of the Day: Not All Who Wander

This flavor does not have a CS-themed name. This summer, my friends and I participated in the Providence 48-hour film festival. We received a genre (horror), a character (Sonya, an addict), a prop (a coffee pot), and a line of dialogue ("I'm pretty sure that's not right."). We then had 48 hours to create a 4-7 minute film. All of the Providence films were screened in a local movie theater, and ours was recently chosen for the screening of the best films from the festival, which will happen this Saturday. I can't wait to go!

Our film is titled "Not All Who Wander", and can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pImhkZ0shts.

If you watch the film, you will see why Not All Who Wander is a coffee ice cream. I tried to find red hots to blend in for the effect of blood droplets swirling into coffee, but I was unable to find them, so I used a different cinnamon candy. It wasn't perfection, but it was pretty good for a creation made after 48 hours of film production.

(De)Feat of Nerdiness: An Ice Dream Deferred

As one of my (few) readers recently reminded me, I have rather neglected this blog of late. Perhaps it is because I experienced a tragic setback in my ice cream production.

Just as I'd promised, I held a sale of my homemade ice cream on Wriston Quad. In the five days before my sale, I prepared ten flavors of ice cream:
Chip Improve-mint
Java
Dough-while
Three-colorability
Peaches and Scheme
Strawberry Seed of Randomness
Secret Key Lime Pie
No-Pumpkin Complete
Bayes-elnut
Big-O

I dressed in my blue dress with the polka-dots and put on my candy cane earrings. I even had my friend Ethan there to juggle with me. Sadly, I had very few customers. I think a lot of the reason was that I didn't advertise very much among people here this summer. I relied mainly on the summer@brown kids, but it happened to be their move-out day. Perhaps I also looked sketchy with all of my mismatched containers. However, I think the solution is really to just make less ice cream. The people who bought it were really astounded, so I suppose I can just shrink my operation.

Luckily, my house had no problem with several left-over quarts. The abundance of ice cream also gave me time to rest up. After this endeavor, I was a bit churned out and didn't create new flavors for a few weeks. However, there were a few that were created since my last post. See above and salivate.