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.