Corpse Cake

Recently inspired by the Thorax Cake made by the cunningly creative and talented Barbara Jo at theyrecoming.com, a friend of mine insisted she wanted one for her upcoming birthday (themed as a wake for her passing youth). It's weird, disgusting and just too much fun so I agreed to make some kind of corpse cake. Just one problem.

I've never baked a cake in my life.

It's not as though I've never baked, but living off of Jiffy Mix Muffins in college doesn't quite cut it as experience. And I have never made frostings, glazes or worked with chocolate.

First, I gathered my resources for inspiration. I was worried that if I couldn't pull off delicious from-scratch cakes, I could at least work on accuracy and hope people would be either so put off by the organs or so drunk by the time the cake was cut, no one would care.


Not your usual cookbooks

About two weeks before the party, I baked a series of cakes. I needed the practice and I needed to make sure my oven would heat properly and evenly. It also gave me an opportunity to experiment with colors. This worked out great even though I used boxed cake mixes. After baking for a day and shaping the organs, I placed them in a tray to get a feel for how it would all come together.


A heartless display

I was really happy with the way it looked and now I could think hard about trying to get the tastes right. The list of cake flavors changed as I thought about them, but ultimately, this was the plan.

Heart - chocolate with seedless raspberry jam filling
Lungs - dyed white cake with pureed and rinsed blueberries swirled with plain white cake
Stomach - orange cake with lime custard filling
Liver - whiskey soaked "pound" cake (dyed a pale post-mortum orange)
Intestines - red velvet cake with lemon filling for the upper intestine and chocolate pudding for the lower intestine.
Ribs and Sternum - dark chocolate with white chocolate coating. I have to thank Barbara Jo for pointing out the troubles she had with solid white chocolate ribs/

Originally, I was going to make additional shoulder, abdominal and hip muscles and place a layer of marzipan skin over the whole thing, but this idea kept getting pushed aside as my energy and patience got sucked up in dealing with the ribs.

My friend, Holly, helped out with the shaping of the ribs. I bought 25 pounds of modelers clay and she suggested casting the whole front as one piece. At this point, I should point out that other than a horribly misshapen ashtray in 5th grade and an odd looking frog in 9th grade, I have never sculpted before. So, Holly sculpted the sternum and ribs and later I covered it in plastic wrap and cast the ribs in dark chocolate. I failed to take pictures of this process because I was hoping it would turn out perfect and all we needed were photos of the finished ribs.

Three days before the party, it was time to get the ribs out of the mold. I had all kinds of ideas ranging from flipping the mold over and pulling the clay away to magically lifting the ribs out. In the end, I decided to dig the clay out from under the ribs. This quickly went all wrong. Every time my hand went in to dig into the clay, it push about 25, then 20, then 15 pounds of clay against the ribs. By the end of the process, all but three ribs had snapped from the sternum.


How am I going to get this back together?

It was more than I could think about. I stuck it all in the freezer and worried about setting up the kitchen for what was about to happen. At this point, I have thank Tonda who made the Lime and Lemon custards, Jessica who shopped for the food colors and powdered meringue and Amie who lent me her Kitchen Aid and lots of cake pans. I popped up an extra table in the kitchen and started baking the cakes. While the cakes cooled, I went to work on the ribs.

I'll make this fairly short. Just imagine a some cursing, a little whining and many heavy sighs. I trimmed extra chocolate off each of the ribs using clay sculpting tools and did a quick test to see if the white chocolate would destroy the ribs. It didn't, but I found that once I got the white chocolate melted, it didn't need to stay at 200 degrees to still be workable. This prevented the dark chocolate from melting too much as I applied the white chocolate. To keep the rib cage supported during the rebuilding, I used some soda cans and aluminum foil. I was able to dip the broken ends of the ribs and literally glue them to the sternum. This took several hours of working with the chocolate for 10 minutes then putting it back in the freezer for 10 minutes.


Great! But can I get them off the foil without losing them?

In between dealing with the ribs, I succeeded in making a royal icing for the whiskey-soaked liver. The liver was baked with about a 1/2C of whiskey. I didn't realize that would make the cake collapse, but having it be very dense was okay. For the soaking, I wrapped the cake in a clean cloth and dribbled a little whiskey over it. Then the whole thing was wrapped in plastic wrap. I added a little more whiskey each day. When it came time to frost the liver, it had turned into a brick. A whiskey soaked, pale orange brick. It was perfect.


That's one pickled liver! (Pre-cirrhosis glaze)

The lungs came out so good, it seemed a shame to cover them in frosting, so attempted to make a simple sugar glaze. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing and made a messy not-so-simple syrup. Despite the problems, it turned out alright. A friend who is a former EMT said, "the lungs are actually disturbing because they are glistening." Yay!

While I wanted to shape the cakes, Holly has experience at frosting so she came over and made the buttercreme frosting. Holly is an actual Artist so she turned the pink stomach into this horrifically distended organ and rolls of cake into the most amazing intestines. Then she frosted the heart and piped some veins on it. I know if I had attempted it, it would be all crumbled and possibly destroyed.

For the display, we used a 13" x 17" artists butcher tray. First the stomach went in, then the heart, Then the liver and the lungs. Then Holly worked some magic on the intestines. While I was working on the ribs. By this point, I was obsessing on the ribs, but prepared to just snap them all and shove them into some cake.


What was the cause of death? Smoker's lung? Cirrhosis of the liver? Enlarged heart?

Amazingly enough, the ribs didn't break at all as we got them off the mold and onto the cake. They were hanging a bit off the sides, but I had baked an extra red sponge cake for random meaty bits and so I simply stuffed it under and around the bottom layer.

The cake went back into the refrigerator and we got dressed. On the way over to the party, only one rib crack cracked and I ignored it. I had made up some simple syrup using corn syrup, red food dye and molasses and gave it an extra drizzle once we got to the party.


Cake delivered. Happy Birthday. Now it's time to soak my liver in whiskey.

Unfortunately, nobody got ill looking at the cake, but there were a couple of wrinkled noses. The most important part was that the Birthday Girl loved it. At one point she said, "The heart is black--like mine!" The liver, the lungs and the heart turned out the best in my opinion, but someone made off with portions of the ribs so I guess that was popular too.


It definitely looks more cake-like. I'm not sure if it looks more appetizing.

That's it. I'm done with this whole cake business. Well, until my birthday. I want a whole leg I can amputate....

Beyond Threaded Conversation

I find it disturbing that the BlogPulse Conversation Tracker represents conversations between blogs as threaded conversations. What I find disturbing is that after years of message board formats being the same, the same, the same, visualization tools are trying to cram blogs conversations into a message board visualization.

Of course, I find it useful because it highlights that the fundamental difference between message boards and blogs is simply one of distributed hosting. The basic structure is still that each post is an object with one of it's properties being connecting data. That connecting data might be of a comment to a parent post or a post on blog B trackbacked to blog A. This, believe it or not, is the same underlying structure of a message board.

That's not to say that switching an object ID in a database for a URL isn't significant. It's insanely significant. Distributed systems are far more interesting that centralized system. But I think that a system that didn't ultimately wind up as a threaded discussion system would be far more interesting.

Some much smarter people than me are already thinking about this. Paul Resnick mentions his Beyond Threaded Conversationworkshop held in conjunction with this week's CHI 2005 Conference. They set up a wiki which includes the original submissions by the workshop participants.

Straight to the point, Marc Smith's Enhanced interfaces for threaded conversations(MSWord file) outlines what data is useful for creating enhanced threaded views and shows an example of a Thread Tree:



Another view of grouping replies comes from Ka-Ping Yee and Marti Hearst in A Visualization to Facilitate Productive Discussions(pdf):



Derek Hansen's Health FACTS: From Conversation to Archive and Back Again(MSWord file) caught my interest because it identifies a problem in my current work. I'll be interested to see how people respond to his peer-pressure model of getting people to clean up their posts for archiving, but I like the idea of a nomination system for identifying and archiving the best discussions. It's something I have done by hand, but it was labor intensive and not scalable. The lyrics to the swan-song of many good ideas.

Yevgeniy Medynskiy mentions ways we can derive Implicit Links in Asynchronous Communication Spaces(pdf). There has already been a number of visualizations of explicit links of social networks. In fact, Conversation Tracker uses explicit trackback links to create a visualization of the blogosphere. However, implicit links can be far more interesting. A comment on a blog mentioning the blogger's birthday implies a relationship beyond the blog. The number of times fark is mentioned on boingboing vs. the times boingboing is mentioned on fark reveals what we already know--that boingboing picks up a lot of content from fark, but not the other way 'round. I see many interesting applications such as revealing who posts more comments than original blog posts (across the blogosphere) or determining the strength of ties between folks. Who are the main posters and trackbackers? Who are the people engaged in dialog? How do these groups interact and bridge?

Even within the confines of threaded discussions, there is a lot of room for innovation. If you have additional examples beyond threaded conversations, please comment and share them.

Yes! I am the "worst"!

Forbes.com's Best of the Web Directory picked SchwabLearning.org as a Forbes Favorite in their Special Needs Resources section. But this part obviously caught my eye:

WORST: The unwieldy general message board would benefit from splitting into subsections devoted to specific issues.

I can't deny it. We don't have any subsections on our message board. Right now, it feels that any attempt to explain how this came about will sound like pure defensiveness. Instead, let me simply say that it was a conscious attempt to not succumb to a major pet peeve I have with message boards (as they currently stand). As Lee LeFever has pointed out, message boards are good Flows, but poor Stocks:

The question is: How can we ensure that flows are being stocked effectively? What makes a good stock?

Websites that flow will find that the management of stocks becomes very important over time. As the flows create new information, the stocks grow to become a rich, but often unwieldy resource. For this reason, website owners should pay particular attention to how stocks are being archived for reference. Easily accessible stocks compliment engaging flows.

- from Introduction to Stocks and Flows (3 of 3): Back to Basics

During the process of parents connecting to support each other, there is a flow of valuable support in both emotional support and informational support. However, getting that valuable flow that back out is the key problem. It gets complicated by the fact that (for me) the information isn't neatly categorizable. School issues blend into home issues. Attention issues blend into reading issues. Even distinct Federal Education laws (Section 504 and IDEA) touch on similar issues (specifically classroom accommodations). Right now, there is a lot of benefit from parents interacting with a diverse range of parents. So how do I keep the discussions flowing, but derive some kind of sense to the stock that is four years worth of parents helping each other?

At the beginning of March, I knew that some kind of bottom-up categorization was what I needed. "I have all this data, there must be some way to highlight specific topics so people can dive in an swim around in the areas they want while having seamless access to the other parts." It will look like subcategories, but it just be one facet of the large complicated jewel that is the world of learning disabilities. Once I got into the idea of thinking in terms of categories as a property of messages instead of categories as buckets for messages, I thought my solution was meta-tagging or some kind of folksonomy. I did my best to keep up with the debate around folksonomies and I was thinking up complicated ways to address the "people are bad categorizers" and "people are lazy" problems.

At this time, I attended the NHVA Innovations Conference. Actually I spoke and, good gravy, they have an mp3 of it (I'm not linking that on purpose). There I met Peter Kaminski and he gave me a new perspective. He pointed out that our messages have all the contextual data I needed. What seemed more appropriate was a search tool that would group the data together by similarities much the way Google News is able to group similar news stories based on the text in the story itself. Man, talk about a *phoom* moment. Thanks, Peter!

What tool would that be? Vector space searching. I'm learning about it and here's where I'm starting:

Building a keyword vector space engine in ColdFusion: adding an extra dimension to your keyword searches

Building a Vector Space Search Engine in Perl

It's not that I think metatagging is right out. I just realize now that with large amounts of text data, more hand-entered text data probably isn't the right direction.

The Corporate Goddesses of 580 California Street

Corporate Goddesses,
originally uploaded by Scott M.

I love these statues. They are at the top of 580 California Street and were made by Muriel Castanis. She described them as "corporate goddesses" in a 1999 San Francisco Chronicle piece on window washers. These empty figures seem to be a theme of hers.

The building itself was designed by the Philip Johnson/Alan Ritchie architecture firm. They have a brief description of the project with images of the whole building.

Update (Oct 2008): Since I first posted this Muriel Castanis died. Her Obituary is in the Nov 2006 New York Times and the LA Times did a story on the statues in Jan 2007.

Update (May 2009): I was contacted by someone in New York who has a 4 foot hanging ghost sculpture by Muriel Castanis for sale. If you are interested, contact me (my email is at the right) and I will pass your interest on.

Under 13 blogging update

Foe Romeo posted last week about LiveJournal for under-13s and in it, I find two corrections to my little post about bogging services and age checks. First, it looks like Blogger does have some check on age, but it is pretty much as Foe describes--hey kids, please lie to us.

Second, it looks like Live Journal has updated their Privacy Policy with a section entitled, "Information Relating to Children". Considering the other toothless "no one under 13" policies I found, I had to give it a check.

The result of registering as a 10yo was being stopped, explained the under 13 policy and sent on to an electronic verification. That turns out to be a credit card check and I didn't bother following through. A much more reasonable attempt at preventing the collection of information by people under 13.

Of course, what I said earlier about who falls under COPPA and for what reasons still applies and Foe's comments about the need and ability to build kid safe online places still holds--and goes largely unanswered.

Late night Flickr Experiment

,
originally uploaded by Scott M.

It's been a long time since I have posted, but I am determined to feel no guilt. Tonight I finally had a chance to get up to the Mormon Temple off Hwy13 in the East Bay. It has been raining off and on for two weeks and I tried twice already.

Well, the third time, it poured on the way up to the place, but stopped by the time I got there. I'm pretty happy with some of my shots (all on Flickr).

Catching up with Jenny Preece's work

I got the opportunity to meet Marc Smith a month ago at an Online Community Summit (where I also got to meet Lee LeFever face to face for the first time). Marc mentioned that Jenny Preece, who I already knew through her book, Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability, had been doing some work on evaluating communities. It took me this long to look up what she was currently up to and I now have about a months worth of reading. Papers on lurking(pdf), on empathy and trust(pdf) and examining a stalled online community(pdf). And much of her recent work have been in small communities that focus on health or technical self-support. So there is the potential this can have a direct impact on my daily work. Wow.

Wait, there is more! Dr. Preece mentored Diane Maloney-Krichmar whose disertation is an ethnographic study of mutual-aid health community. I haven't had a chance to find contact information for her to see if she has published that disertation yet. It's late on Friday and I have to wisk down to LA tonight to see the Body Worlds Exhibit. In the mean time, if this stuff tickles your fancy and you find some specific interesting things, please post them in comments or on your blog and I will link to you (damn blogspot and no trackback).