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September 28, 2007

Activities: The First Annual Hot Tomato Dance Picnic

[art by Shawn Dell Joyce]

This weekend all the fun is happening on Sunday. So, get your churchin' in on Saturday and free yourself for all the good stuff on the Lord's Day.

On September 30th, 1820 Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson ate a bushel (24 kg) of tomatoes in Salem, Massachusetts, proving that the tomato is not lethal. Now you can eat a whole bushel of tomatoes too!

What: The First Annual Hot Tomato Dance Picnic
When: Sunday, September 30th, 3-6:30 pm
Where: At the Naumberg Bandshell in Central Park
(On the central promenade, mid-park between 66th and 70th streets)
Fee: Free (donations appreciated)
Michael Arenella and his 11-piece Dreamland Orchestra, in collaboration with Central Park Swings , invite you to join us in Central Park, for a late afternoon of Hot '20s jazz, dancing and picnicking. And of course to celebrate the induction of the tomato as edible, non-poisonous fare. Prizes will be awarded to the best tomato-based picnic recipe!

What: Medieval Festival - get your turkey bones...need we say more.
When: Sunday, September 30th, 11:30am - 6:00pm
Where: Fort Tyron Park (directions)
Fee: Free

Chile Pepper Fiesta. Click here for more details.

And if you're in Atlanta, GA this weekend, be sure to check out the JapanFest for

- cooking demonstrations by Koichi Mimura, official chef of the Consul General of Japan, and Kuniaki Yoshimura, former chef and owner of Satsuki Restaurant in Atlanta; tea ceremony demonstrations; a green tea house; a tea ceremony demonstration by Hisashi Yamada, director of the Urasenke Chanoyu Center in New York, and many more exciting attractions.
- a display of the art of Japanese plastic food. In the Meiji era at the end of the 19th century, Japanese restaurant-goers were frequently confronted with strange new Western foods on their menus.
- a wide selection of Japan dishes, ready for sampling

Posted by Cakehead at 04:33 AM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2007

Activity: The Great Gathering of Chefs

If you have money to burn and want to do some serious sandwich eating tonight, why not head to the Atrium of the Trump Tower for The Great Gathering of Chefs, presented by Battman Studios to Benefit the Children's Storefront (a tuition-free school in Harlem).

When: Thursday, Sept. 27, 3-5 pm - Meet the Chefs / Sandwich and Wine Tasting
6-8 pm - Second Course
Where: Trump Tower, 725 Fifth Ave. at 56th St.
Fee: $250 Meet the Chefs / Sandwich and Wine Tasting / first and second course and an autographed book, Sandwiches of the World. $100 Sandwich and Wine Tasting / second course.
To purchase tickets click here.

Posted by Cakehead at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2007

Cakehead of the Week: Cake-Shaped Soap for Rudy Giuliani

Soap Cakes from Kilian Nakamura

This week we present Republican presidential candidate, Rudolph Giuliani, with the Cakehead of the Week Award. His prize is a collection of Japanese soaps in the shape of cakes and ice cream. We're hoping that the prize can help him to "launder" the dirty fundraising money being raised tonight at the "$9.11 for Rudy" party in Palo Alto, CA. Or, better yet, they can just serve the dessert soaps at the party and all those grubby Republicans can wash out their mouths.

[thanks for the tip Rumproast and Buzzfeed]

Posted by Cakehead at 11:27 PM | Comments (0)

Edible Designs by Katja Gruijter

edible shortbread tiles

Dutch Food Designer, Katja Gruijter uses food and drink as her materials. From her bread trays, bread bag and shortbread tiles, her work is beautiful to look at and keeps the salivary glands functioning.

[via Culiblog]

bread plate in the form of a painter's palette

edible bread bag

Posted by Cakehead at 11:16 PM | Comments (0)

Welcome Back to the Blogosinterweb, Rumproast

Obviously, we don't know our cuts of meat. We accidentally made a Welcome Back Steak Cake instead of the more appropriate Rumproast Cake

He's back, and we're so relieved. Our cakes have been coming out dry and sunken, but with Rumproast back in the blog world to point us to the correct ingredients, we know that we'll be baking those rich decadent cakes again soon. And to get things started with a kick of spice, he recommends that you head to The 15th Annual Red Hot Chili Pepper Fiesta in Brooklyn this weekend.

When: Sunday, September 30, Noon-6 pm
Where: Brooklyn Botanical Gardens
Fee: Free with Admission
What: Join us for New York's hottest fall tradition. It's like a big Brooklyn block party where the grooves are smokin', the chile peppers are scorching, and the dancers are calling for water. You can learn the Cajun two-step, master Indian chutney-making, discover traditional Peruvian dance, attend movie screenings, pick up peppery gardening tips from "the Chile Goddess," or join other endorphin-inspired workshops, demonstrations, and exhibits for the whole family. There's hot food and cold beer too!

Posted by Cakehead at 11:06 PM | Comments (1)

Game: Candy Inspector

Some evil person has put harmful things inside candy boxes. It's up to you to figure out which ones are safe for the kiddies.

[from AddictingGames]

Posted by Cakehead at 11:03 PM | Comments (1)

Williamsburg stays sweet. Domino Sugar Factory Gets Landmark Status

Domino Sugar Factory image from Curbed

The Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is protected against developers and wrecking balls.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission voted unanimously Tuesday to give landmark status to the Domino Sugar Factory along the Brooklyn waterfront. The cluster of three brick buildings was completed in 1884 and at the time stood as the largest sugar refinery in the world. The refinery closed in 2004 and was acquired by CPC Resources, the development arm of the Community Preservation Corporation, which plans to convert the building and surrounding property into residences.

[from AM New York]

However, it seems that there wasn't enough sugar to sweeten the deal and keep the beautiful, yet creepy Adant House around. According to Curbed,

The landmarking left out some historic structures including the Adant House next to the Williamsburg Bridge, which has its own fan club. If the New Domino plan is approved, meanwhile, the Old Domino would be surrounded by buildings up to 30-40 stories tall.

Posted by Cakehead at 10:06 PM | Comments (0)

Mini Camcorder Fits in Pack of Gum

For all those CIA agents-in-training, this gadget is for you.

Spygadgets.com is selling what they claim to be the world's smallest camcorder. It neatly fits in an empty pack of gum. It records up to 33 hours of 15 fps video on it's 1 GB micro SD card. It connects to your PC via USB to charge itself and transfer video. It costs $295. The only problem is the low-res video quality.

[From Geekologie]

Posted by Cakehead at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)

Eat the Collagen: Say goodbye to painful collagen injections!

Why turned to needles, when you can enjoy a delicious meal made of collagen at a Japanese restaurant in the West Village that's scheduled to open next month.

The beauty-addicted have long loved collagen, rubbing creams into their skin and plumping up lips and cheeks with injections. Now there's a movement to eat the stuff. Himi Okajima, whose restaurant Himiyabi in Japan was one of the first to introduce collagen cuisine, will open Hakata TonTon in the West Village next month, where he'll serve foods rich in the protein responsible for skin and muscle tone. "Collagen helps your body retain moisture," Okajima says.

[NY Magazine via BuzzFeed]

Posted by Cakehead at 01:41 AM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2007

Prison Food Convention

As part of their Conventional Wisdom series, Slate visited the exhibition hall at this year's conference for the prison food industry. The lesson school children should take from the video is they're better off eating prison food than school lunch, since the prison system demands higher quality food than the school system.

[from Slate via BoingBoing]

Posted by Cakehead at 02:34 PM | Comments (0)

Answers to your most pressing questions about food, drinks & digestion

Why are bananas curved?

The new book, Do Cats Have Belly Buttons, answers useless trivia questions like:

Why are bananas curved?
Bananas grow on tall trees in big bunches around the top of the trunk. Their curving shows how efficient nature is. Their shape means they can fit very closely together, which allows more bananas to grow around the tree - as many as 50 in a bunch.

Why does a drink fizz up when you drop an ice cube in?
In a liquid, gas bubbles are formed when they attach to a solid surface. They form especially well when placed against something rough. So, in a liquid drink there are thousands of tiny potential bubbles in the dissolved carbon dioxide jostling for position against the wall of the glass, hoping to take shape. When a rough ice cube is placed in the drink, the carbon dioxide fights to attach itself to the cube so it can shape itself as lots of gassy bubbles. It prefers the ice cube to the glass because of the roughness of the cube.

What causes the feeling of butterflies in the stomach?
These are actually small muscle contractions in the digestive tract. The gut's muscles are normally well co-ordinated - but when disrupted by stress, the body's priority is no longer digestion. So, rather than wasting vital blood and oxygen supplies on processing food, the body diverts them to the legs where they can be better used - for example, to help us run out of the way of danger. The gut is therefore shut down by the brain, leaving it with irregular rhythmic contractions.

Can chewing gum get tangled up in your intestine?
Many parents have warned their children this might happen - but it simply isn't true. Although gum can stick to shoes, bus seats, hair and pavements, it makes its way unhindered through the digestive system - passing straight through the stomach and on to the intestines. It cannot adhere to the moist and slippery walls of the gut.

[from Daily Mail via Reddit.com]

Posted by Cakehead at 02:19 PM | Comments (0)

September 24, 2007

Cupcake Wars

Make Cupcakes Not War teeshirts from Johnny Cupcakes Clothing

We always love when the The Week In Review section of the Sunday Times clears a little space for cupcake coverage. Who knew the tiny cakes could cause such a stir.

The confection is so powerfully embedded in the national consciousness -- and palate --that its future is quite possibly the only cause to unite Texas Republicans and at least some left-wing foodies behind a singular mission: keep the cupcake safe from harm.

"I think the wholesale banning of parents' bringing cupcakes as a legal issue is over the top," said Rachel Kramer Bussel, a former sex columnist for The Village Voice who founded the Web site "Cupcakes Take the Cake" three years ago.

The Texas Legislature agreed, in spirit, when it passed the "Safe Cupcake Amendment," in 2005, in response to new federal child nutrition guidelines and lobbying from parents outraged by the schoolroom siege on cupcakes. [by SARAH KERSHAW, NYTimes.com]

If we were allowed to eat more cupcakes in our youth we probably wouldn't crave them as often as we do. Then again, we also wouldn't have created a weblog devoted to cakeheads.

Posted by Cakehead at 07:06 PM | Comments (0)

September 21, 2007

No More Smelly Fingers: Presenting White Castle's Surf & Turf

image from landraider.com

There's something peculiar about the desire to rub smelly lobster fingers over a steak carving knife. That's exactly what happened when my customers ordered the surf and turf. The lobster and I were always offended by the customer's desire to overpower the delicacy of lobster meat and finish the meal with a slab of cow. With White Castle's Surf & Turf sandwich the lobster doesn't have to compete with the steak -- because the "surf" isn't lobster. Just fried fish as the surf and prison-grade beef as the turf in eight layers of sandwich! And since surf and turf is neatly contained between multiple layers of bread there will be no more smelly fingers.

Strangely, our search for White Castle Surf & Turf on the interweb didn't yield many results. All we were able to find were retro-style blogs describing how awesome the sandwich is and these nutritional facts.

Posted by Cakehead at 03:46 AM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2007

Impress Your Boss with this Dinner Table Trick

If small talk dries up at your next company dinner, impress the boss with this fork and toothpick balancing act.

[5min.com via Digg.com]

Posted by Cakehead at 04:20 AM | Comments (0)

September 19, 2007

Dreamhouse: Made of Chocolate Legos

Okay. So building a house built out of chocolate Legos is not the best idea, unless you live in a climate that is consistently 45 degrees. But it's fun to think about licking a wall and having it taste like chocolate.

[from Chocablog via growabrain]

Posted by Cakehead at 04:35 AM | Comments (0)

September 18, 2007

Cakehead of the Week: Burnt (Condi) Rice Cake

In our book, Rice Cakes aren't technically cakes, but that's what makes the metaphor so apt. Conde Rice is not a cake, even though we present her with a consolation Rice Cakehead of the Week award since the Pope hates her.

Pope Benedict XVI refused to meet US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in August, saying he was on holiday, an Italian newspaper reported Wednesday. Rice "made it known to the Vatican that she absolutely had to meet the pope" to boost her diplomatic "credit" ahead of a trip to the Middle East, the Corriere della Sera daily reported without citing its sources. She was hoping to meet the pontiff at his summer residence of Castel Gandolfo at the beginning of August, it said.

"'The pope is on holiday' was the official response," the paper said.

It said the reply "illustrated the divergence of view" between the Vatican and the White House about the "initiatives of the Bush administration in the Middle East."

[from Breitbart via Digg.com]

Posted by Cakehead at 03:57 AM | Comments (0)

September 17, 2007

Intel Demos Skulltrail PC Gaming Platform with Soda Fountain Potential

All those juices in the new Intel dual-socket PC platform make it look like it could moonlight as a soda fountain. Juice up with a jolt of Red Bull before revving up for some extreme gaming. The platform is running their upcoming 45-nanometer Quad-Cores, X38 chipset and dual-x16 PCI Express Graphics.

The board —specially created by Intel and NVIDIA for the show— used two GeForce cards in SLI. However, the big news is that either Intel or its partners could included NVIDIA's nForce MCP technology in future Skulltrail boards. The PCs will be designed for extreme gaming, which may mean either kicking butt in BioShock or playing Tetris while doing bungee jumps.

[via Gizmodo]

Posted by Cakehead at 02:14 PM | Comments (0)

September 14, 2007

Time-Lapse Food

We're going to make a time lapse cheese and tomato sandwich with all these time lapse videos of food!

[ChedderVision tip via BuzzFeed]

Posted by Cakehead at 01:04 AM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2007

Bestiality Restaurant Hams it Up

[photo from Lastsicko]

At a members-only restaurant in the Tokyo entertainment district Roppongi, having pork prepared "your way" also means having your way with the pork. According to The Mainichi Daily News, wealthy customers can engage in the forbidden practice of sleeping with dinner.

Once the customer feels prepared, they will be presented with beast of their choice. In the lawyer's case, it was a sow. "I'd been told what to expect, but when I actually saw what was happening, it was as shocking as you'd imagine it to be," M tells Jitsuwa Knuckles. "Later, the lawyer told me the appeal of the place just came about because when people have got money and done everything else, they turn toward bestiality."

Once the lawyer had finished porking the pig, the couple returned to the first floor and sat at a table to dine. M says she was totally shocked when staff members carried in roast pork -- made of the same sow the lawyer had earlier been with.

"I was about to vomit," M says. "It was the same pig that had been squealing just moments before. Now, it had been roasted whole. I managed to avoid eating it by only having salad."

Incidentally, prices range from 200,000 yen to 500,000 yen for a chicken, dogs cost somewhere between 300,000 yen and 800,000 yen, while pigs and goats start at around 800,000 yen. Charges are higher depending on whether the creature is female and how active it is.

[from InventorSpot via Digg.com]

Posted by Cakehead at 12:33 AM | Comments (14)

September 12, 2007

The Sadder You Are the More Ice Cream You Get

Everyone knows that ice cream is the perfect cure for depression and sadness. Now there's a voice-activated, self-serve frozen custard machine serving up an antidote for the blues. The portion sizes are based on the level of depression the machine detects in a voice-stress analysis, so the sadder you are the more ice cream you get! Demitrios Kargotis unveiled his Mr Whippy machine at the Ars Technica festival in Linz.

[WeMakeMoneyNotArt via BoingBoing]

Posted by Cakehead at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)

September 11, 2007

Is Commitment Ceremony Cake Tastier than Wedding Cake?

According to FoodReference.com September is National Biscuit, Chicken, Honey, Mushroom, Papaya and Potato Month. But September for us means weddings. A lesbian wedding in a red states, a heterosexual wedding in a blue state. Every weekend of September we will be eating some form of commitment cake. For this reason we're declaring that September is officially Wedding Cake Tasting Month.

We'll report back at the end of the month to let you know whether commitment ceremony cake tastes better than civil union cake and how hetero wedding cake compares to both.

Posted by Cakehead at 04:44 AM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2007

Cook Breakfast Tacos with director Robert Rodriguez

There's no human blood and guts in these breakfast tacos. In his Sin City Cooking School film director, Robert Rodriguez, teaches how to prepare these tasties in 10 minutes.

[thefoodmonkey.com via buzzfeed]

Posted by Cakehead at 02:20 PM | Comments (0)

September 05, 2007

World's Top 50 Restaurant Results are In

Unless you're in the disposable income tax bracket, you're once again going to be disappointed by the financially inaccessible poll results. But in case you're curious or are disciplined about saving for a dinner splurge, here are the top 50 restaurants in the world, according to people who get paid to dine at these eating institutions. You'll find us on a cheap tapas crawl in San Sebastian or a pastry crawl in Paris or grazing the taco stands of San Francisco. Oh, and Per se somehow made it on the list -- despite reported nose dives in meeting expectations.

1. El Bulli, Montjoi, Roses, Spain (Nr. Barcelona) -- World's Best Restaurant, Best Restaurant in Europe
2. The Fat Duck, Bray, Berkshire, U.K. (Nr. London) -- Chef's Choice (voted for by last year's 50 Best)
3. Pierre Gagnaire, Paris, France
4. French Laundry, Yountville, California, USA -- Best Restaurant in the Americas
5. Tetsuya's, Sydney, Australia -- Best Restaurant in Australasia

The other 45 top restaurants click here.

Posted by Cakehead at 02:33 PM | Comments (0)

September 04, 2007

Gourmet Lunch Ladies

Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA

Each fall, returning to school meant access to rectangular pizza slabs, steak-ums and tatter tots -- food that was off limits at home during the summer months. School lunch was a treat. But some students in Maine will no longer be served meals like this on the marbleized plastic partitioned trays. Thanks to the hard work of our dear friend, Amanda Beal, in our homestate of Maine, many students will be eating well this fall. California has been doing this stuff for a while. But we feel a certain amount of pride given our ties to the little state.

Even the pickiest eater would've appreciated the scene in the kitchen of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. Trays stacked with orange and yellow carrots, miniature yellow summer squash and purple and green jalapenos crowded the counters. Colanders overflowed with heirloom tomatoes and scrubbed potatoes. Bouquets of fresh herbs awaited chopping.

The 11 "lunch ladies" from Boothbay Harbor, Yarmouth and Hall-Dale Elementary School in Hallowell quickly got to work, weighing ingredients, peeling vegetables, slicing and dicing. At once, a cacophony of sounds filled the room -- a whisk on a stainless-steel bowl, the clang of metal pans, the whir of a food processor shredding carrots. Soon, the aromas of cilantro, sauteed onions and pot-pie gravy mingled in the air.

On the menu: For their first course, diners can choose from Autumn Harvest Corn & Chevre Pudding, Maple Roasted Root Vegetables or Carrot-Ginger Soup. For the main course --make that the Maine course -- offerings include Italian-Inspired Pasta with Maine White Beans & Veggies, Chicken Pot Pie with Maine Mashed Potatoes or an organic Barbecue Beef Burger. Sides include Aroostook Wheat Berry Salad, Heirloom Tomato Salsa and Carrot-Raisin Slaw. And for dessert, the mouth-watering lineup includes Pumpkin Snack Cakes, Wild Blueberry Cobbler and Maine Apple Gingerbread.
[from Bangor Daily News, by Kristen Andresen]

The corporate cafeteria of midtown Manhattan sound grim in comparison. We may have to return home, live with the parents and head back to school.

Posted by Cakehead at 02:13 PM | Comments (0)