I’ve been helping out planning a hackathon with Microsoft and a friend from Skype.
Last weekend it was time to set it in motion.

We opened the doors for 31 hours at Skype's office in Stockholm.
In that time we had an app battle, game tournament, table tennis tournament and of course LOTS of coding and equal amounts of Red Bull.

This is 45 min after we opened the door:

A friend of mine, Iris Classon came to visit. It so happened that it was her birthday and I promised her a cake.
She has a blog series “stupid question of the day” so naturally I choose her self portrait for one of the cakes

She looked very happy
The cakes was filled with Strawberry mousse, chocolate mousse, dulce de leche and raspberries, covered with whipped cream. Decorations is made out of sugarpaste and flowerpaste.

Making a gingerbread house is a tradition we like to uphold. A traditional house isn’t that common around our home.
We stuck to last years theme “cool gadget” and made a Microsoft Surface.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to give it all the details I would’ve wanted. I did manage to put on (install) some apps though, including two of my husband’s (www.apeoholic.se)

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview was released close to our birthdays this year, which made the whole pick-a-cake-theme process really easy this year.
We are both early adopters and huge Microsoft fans so it just had to be a beta fish (or betta).

Unfortunately the marbling in the blue doesn’t come through in the picture, neither does the two different reds and blues on the fish itself :/

The cake was filled with raspberries, vanilla, whipped cream and Dulce De Leche buttercream and covered with marzipan/sugar paste. The fish was made of sugar paste.

When the department I currently work in asked me to make a cake I couldn’t resist making a Windows Phone themed cake.
Having had the impressive Nokia Lumia 800 for a while you could say I was somewhat inspired

The cake is filled with raspberries, vanilla, whipped cream and dulce de leche buttercream. All decorations in Marzipan and Sugarpaste.

The stor(e)y behind this cake: It was a cloudy day when I made the cake. We felt like one instance was enough for our department. Just before serving the cake we put it on the table for storage (get it?). Afterwards we all felt like blobs (sorry, I’m married to a pun master and it seams to rub off a bit)

I have been working (internship of sorts) at Microsoft for a couple of months now and when a colleague was leaving for another job, I got asked to make a cake.

Since he was working with Windows Azure, I couldn’t think of a better theme for the cake than the cloud.

I like the cloud power logo, so I went for it. It might not come through in the picture but it is 6 nuances of Azure on the cake

The cake is filled with raspberries, vanilla, whipped cream and dulce de leche buttercream. All decorations in Marzipan/Sugarpaste.

I had the honor to get invited to Skelleftehamn by a friend to be a witness at their wedding, and make the cakes for the reception. The ceremony was small but very nice with just 3 witnesses. We had to go by boat (just a small one) to a lighthouse island.

The bride wanted 3 different simple, not tiered cakes. So I did my best. She was very happy and the guests seemed somewhat impressed.

It was a bit scary making someone's wedding cakes, she WILL remember it forever, success or failure. I’m glad my first time was for such a good friend, she would forgive me if I failed
Now I’m ready for the next challenge.

The white cake is filled with strawberries and whipped vanilla/wild strawberry frosting. The pale pink cake is filled with strawberry mousse and meringue mousse. The chocolate cake is an adaptation of Nigella Lawson's chocolate fudge cake. All the flowers are handmade with flower paste (gum paste)

Since the coming update of Windows Phone 7 is called "Mango" everything mango is more desirable to WP7 geeks right now. So I just had to make some mango cupcakes.

My husband and I were talking about different projects we have going on, one of them being an augmented reality app for WP7 he is working on.
It just hit me that we had to make the mango cupcakes augmented reality enabled, so we did :P

I made a basic cupcake with mango bits, cut the top of to allow the print to lay flat and hollowed it out to make room for some mango-lime curd. The marker is printed out with food color on malty sheets so it’s completely edible.

We bought a 3D model of a mango and my husband did the software-part.

ARToolKit Marker Generator allows you to generate personalized markers and the needed .pat file. It was very easy, just hold up the picture to your webcam and take a snapshot. The generator does the rest for you.

Here it is in action

I'm sorry for the crappy video, we don't have the best circumstances for photography or video shooting in our home :P

If you are interested in learning more about AR for Windows Phone 7 you can read more about it on my husbands blog
He has amongst other things made a working augmented reality ZX Spectrum emulator, how cool is that?!

I've recently found an app for my windows phone 7 that I like more and more. It's a fun, quirky app that lists "themed days" like Mother's day, Mardi Gras and Cinnamon roll day.
It supports Live Tile so I don't have to miss out on such a day ever again.
It also lists lesser known days like International hug a musician day, Vegan Pizza day and Carrot day.

"Temadagar" is only available in Swedish, at least for now (you could always send him a request :P) and can be found here

Today is Cupcake day, and I just happened to have a new recipe for raspberry frosting I wanted to try, imagine that :P
It's probably the best frosting I ever made. Not too sweet and lots of raspberry taste.
The frosted cupcakes is lemon cupcakes and the others are tiger cupcakes (chocolate/vanilla)

Let's not speak about the fancy cake box :P

What better way to celebrate First Contact Day than to show you a recent cake I made?
Yeah, I know that first contact isn't until 2063 but what kind of geek would I be if I didn't mention it?

A friend of mine is a Borg, no really he is! At least it's his last name.
He also happens to be a Trekker so when his birthday came up he wanted an assimilated princess cake (common cake in Sweden).

So here it is, pale Borg skin, implants and all. And no Borg cake is complete without a "laser" (in this case an LED) 

It was a bit hard not to make it with a nice finish, but hey it's a Borg!


For those of you who are into electronics or puns, this one's for you: Resistance is futile

Get it? Futile? No? :P (zero ohm resistor)

The cake is filled with raspberries, vanilla and whipped cream. Covered with sugarpaste/marzipan with a crumb coat of Dulce De Leche buttercream. All the black details (and the resistor) are made of chocolate modelingpaste. I brushed the cake with Vodka for a bit semi-slimy skin, but it doesn't show that well in the picture.

This was my first attempt of making modeling chocolate, but it turned out great. Not to mention how delicious it was. I'll have to try it again sometime.

Live long and prosper

The IE 9 release just happens to fall on PI day and that must be a reason for having cupcakes.
To celebrate the big event I made some mini cupcakes today.

It's a lemon cupcake with a lemon flavored Swiss merengue buttercream, dark chocolate PI's and sugarpaste IE icons.

Now we at least have something to eat while waiting for the IE 9 release.