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Kouign amann and the queen of pulsars

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Hi all! Apologies for the maaaaajor delay on the third post. Things have been nutso with courses and planetarium work and I've been traveling a lot, but I've still been baking! I've been working on the challenges but by the time I'm finished with them, I'm usually too exhausted to post. I've been doing at least one challenge per week and just haven't posted any of them, but look out for a bunch in the near future. Anyway, in this post, I'm going to talk about one of last week's bakes: kouign amann (the first word pronounced like "queen"), better known as Brittany pastries! 

After traveling for 3 weekends in a row and not having access to my stand mixer, I took to Twitter for suggestions as to what to bake. When someone mentioned kouign amann, I knew it had to be my next challenge. I had been putting them off simply because they're time-consuming. They do, however, only require basic ingredients like bread flour (what the British call "strong flour"), yeast, butter, and sugar. The whole process was a lot like making croissants, which I've done from scratch a few times; you take dough and butter that's been rolled out, put the butter in the middle, fold it, rest it in the fridge, and repeat. You have to prove this dough (let it rise) before the laminating (folding in of butter) which I thought was a bit weird, but the recipe was fairly straightforward. The dough had to go through 3 rounds of lamination but it wasn't too bad (croissants basically take a whole day to make and you bake them the next day!). Only stumbles were caused by the fact that I didn't fully read the directions...I made measurement errors and didn't put the sugar where it should have been (I sprinkled it as I made them into their shapes instead of after that). This recipe was really successful though and if you have some time, definitely worth trying (recipe here). Plus they're pretty!

Number of mistakes made because of not reading directions: 2
Difficulty of the bake: 6/10 
Weird ingredients needed: none
Kitchen destruction factor: 5/10

So today we have a very special pulsar post! The week before I tackled these pastries, I got to meet the discoverer of pulsars herself, Jocelyn Bell Burnell!! She was such an amazing individual and so modest about all she's accomplished (and it's a lot!). So, in honor of her, let's talk a bit about the discovery of pulsars.

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Pulsars were discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell when she was a graduate student at Cambridge University. At the time, she was looking for quasars (which are really really ancient giant black holes) with the radio telescope she helped make. While searching, she noticed a repeating signal in her data. The signal was really periodic and appeared to be coming from one area of the sky. Because it moved with the stars (rose 3 minutes earlier every day), she thought that it must be coming from the heavens and not Earth. Finally, after ruling out everything else, she and her advisor Dr. Anthony Hewish named the source LGM-1, standing for “Little Green Man 1" because they thought the source might be extraterrestrial. The term "pulsar" was coined during an interview with the press, who wanted some kind of catchy name for the stars. Soon more of these sources began to pop up from different areas of the sky, and the field of pulsars was born! Her advisor went on to win the Nobel Prize for the discovery of pulsars, even though she's the one who discovered them (that prize is aptly called the “No-Bell prize"). When asked about how she felt about her advisor getting the prize, she said that there had been no astronomers given the Nobel Prize in Physics and the fact that her discovery paved the way for more astronomers being rewarded for their work makes her happy (see, modest!!). She's such an amazing human being and it was so wonderful to get the chance to hear her stories and interact with her.

Thanks so much for reading and check back next week for more stories of British baking and pulsar facts!​​

Candied peel and cool planets

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Second bake of the challenge, yay! This week's confection? Florentines. They're sweet cookies made of nuts and fruit and basically look like a lacy cookie. When I was little, my mom used to make a variation of these for teachers at the end of the year and wrap them in cellophane with and tie them with a ribbon. They always looked gorgeous! Now, what does this British recipe have in store for me? Let's see.

When I looked at the list of ingredients, one of the first things that caught my eye on the list was "glacé cherries." Thank goodness it said "or dried cranberries" or the recipe would have definitely gone without a berry component. I was not dealing with that again, no way (see the post below if you haven't read about my cherry catastrophe....). The other ingredients were fairly standard so I didn't think this bake would be too much of a hassle and this time I was actually right. I went to the store and got all of the ingredients and set off to make the first component, candied citrus peel. This time I actually needed to candy something, I was sure of it. I hadn't made candied citrus peel before but the recipe I found (see Recipe Archive for details!) seemed fairly straightforward. It was also Alton Brown's recipe and he knows his stuff. You could probably do lemon or lime but I chose orange just because. And in the first injury of this baking injury of the season, I was peeling an orange and the peeler just kept on goin'....whoops! Anyway, nothing major. Behind it is the finished candied peel, which was delicious!

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The florentines themselves weren't very difficult. I chopped up walnuts, almonds, craisins, and the orange peel and added them to a mixture of butter, sugar, and golden syrup. The recipe called for demerara sugar which is close to turbinado sugar aka Sugar in the Raw. I got a big box of it at the store thinking I could just pour it into the batter from there....NOPE! It was little packets. Someone didn't read the box correctly. It was only about 10 packets, a minor annoyance but oh well! The golden syrup was something I had only see on British Bake-Off and I guess it's a British thing (it's syrup made out of cane sugar) but luckily Kroger's international aisle was stocked with it! Anyway, the florentines were fairly successful and easy to do. My only "whoopsies" (okay only isn't the right word here...let's see, peeler incident, sugar incident,...well you know what I mean) in the bake was the chocolate coating. It said to put the chocolate on one side of the cookie and I just did the bottom half instead of the whole back side. I actually like that better though because the cookie is delicious without the chocolate too! I wanted to make sure to get the recipe exact so when melting the chocolate, I brought it up to the right temperature and then had to bring it down to 25˚C.......which took FOREVER. There are chocolate handprints on the freezer door from the multiple times I took it out and checked it and then had to put it back in! Overall, a successful bake!

Number of injuries: 1
Difficulty of the bake: 3/10 
Weird ingredients needed: demerara sugar, golden syrup
Kitchen destruction factor: 4/10

Pulsar time!

This week I'm going to talk about about pulsar planets! Fun fact: the first planet ever discovered outside outside our solar system was discovered about a pulsar! It was actually a system of planets discovered by Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail (who I actually got to meet a few years back at a conference which was so cool!!). Below is that system (the disks of candied orange peel representing the planets) with the three planets in it! There are currently a total of 7 pulsar planets around 4 different pulsars that have been confirmed and a few more are postulated. Pulsars are extreme systems with huge magnetic fields and immense gravity. Here are a few ways pulsar planets can form (summary courtesy of my friends at AstroBites):
1. Planets that survive the supernova: a star needs to go supernova (aka shed its outer layers in a violent explosion) in order to become a pulsar. It is possible that the planet was around the star and survived the supernova. However, this isn't likely because astronomers think that the type of stars that form pulsars are too big to host planets.
2. Fallback from the supernova: after the supernova, the material that was expelled in the outer layers of the stars could form a ring around the star and eventually become planets
3. Destruction/evaporation of a companion: a lot of stars are in binaries, or double star systems. When one star goes supernova and becomes a pulsar, the other is left behind and the pulsar's radiation could strip the layers off of the star so much that that star becomes a planet.

Pulsar planets are super cool and the fact that they can form around such extreme systems is insane. Stay tuned for more on how we can detect things like planets around pulsar!

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Thanks so much for reading and stay tuned, next week I'll be doing my first bread challenge!

Cores, cones, and cherry cake

Let the games begin! 

​I set out on my first official challenge on Saturday. The first bake? Mary Berry's classic cherry cake. Easy enough, right? It just looks like an ordinary cherry cake. I've watched enough Great British Baking Show to know that the trick to this one is just with the cherries: in order to not have them sink to the bottom of the cake, you need to coat them in flour. Awesome. 
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So I set out to make this culinary confection. The first ingredient the recipe calls for is 200g of glacé cherries. With a quick Google search, I found out that these are basically candied cherries. I thought to myself, "Okay that seems easy enough!" Current me is laughing at past me for that thought. I looked up a recipe for candied cherries, went to the store and got the ingredients, and started work on the candied cherries so they would be ready for baking that night. Making the candied cherries involved simply mixing sugar and maraschino cherry juice, putting the maraschino cherries into the boiling liquid, and letting them hang out before taking them off the heat and putting the cherries onto some parchment paper to sit while we ate the delicious remnants (which were basically like cherry lollipops). The candies were just like any hard candy: soft when heated and then when the sugar hardens, there's no messing around with them. I left the cherries and went on about my day and then started the cake that night. 

The thing no one mentioned in the recipe comments....that glacé cherries in the UK....not the same as in the US. In the UK I guess they're just cherries soaked in a heavy syrup. How did I find this out? Well the first step in the recipes was to quarter the cherries. Have you ever tried to cut apart a peppermint hard candy? Yeah, not fun! It took about 20 minutes of smashing hard candies on a cutting board while being very cautious not to cut off an appendage to get all of the cherries I needed. Once I finished that, the rest of the cake was fairly straightforward. I read that eggs in the UK are a bit different than the ones in the US in terms of size but I used the recommended amount in the recipe and the cake turned out fine. Tah-dah, Mary Berry's classic cherry cake! The recipe called for a few toasted almonds on top and in order to create a bit more color, I toasted a few and then added more to the pan before the others finished cooking so there would be different shades. Also, when I tried to flip it out of the bundt tin, half fell out onto the cooling rack and half stayed in the pan....thank goodness for icing and toppings, am I right? Can't even notice! Overall, a fairly successful bake! 
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Difficulty of the bake: 4/10 (without the cherry difficulties, it would be 2/10)
Weird ingredients needed: other than glacé cherries, I pretty much had everything else on hand (the ground almonds just  because I like making macarons!)
Kitchen destruction factor: 3/10
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And now for the pulsar part!! 

I had an amazing mentor during undergrad named Dr.Joanna Rankin. Joanna taught me everything I know about pulsars and has done so much on pulsar emission. She's such an incredible woman and her zeal for the subject has made me passionate about emission physics as well!

So we hear pulsars referred to as "cosmic lighthouses" all the time. However, the lighthouse model only works to a certain extent. When a lighthouse beam crosses our sightline, we see the narrow beam of light, that's it. The light beam of pulsar emission is more complicated than that. One of the current models of the pulsar beam is called the core-double-cone model (mainly developed by Joanna!). It states that the pulsar emission beam is made up of three components: a core (the cherry), and inner cone (the slivered almonds), and the outer cone (the lemon icing). Depending on our sightline, we see different parts of that beam.

When we observe a pulsar beam, we observe what we call an average profile (see lemon icing graphs), which is basically the amount of energy we see from the beam as it passes out sightline. If this was a lighthouse, the average profile would just be one bump because it's one area of energy. With pulsars though, the number of bumps we see can tell us about how the beam passes our sightline. If our pulsar passes through the line toward the bottom of the beam (the butter representing our line of sight), we would see only the two edges of the outer cone; if our sightline passed totally through the pulsar beam (the lemon zest), we would see five components: the core, the two sides of the inner cone, and the two sides of the outer cone. Average profiles come in all different shapes and sizes: profiles can have anywhere from 1-5 (and possibly more) components, the components can vary in height, and they can also evolve in frequency and become taller or shorter. The higher frequency you observe, the closer to the surface of the cake (uh I mean pulsar....) you get. Pulsar emission geometry is so fascinating and there's still so much we don't know about it!

Thanks to everyone for reading and check back next week to see how my adventures with florentines go!





Welcome to the Pulsars and Profiteroles Project!
Hi all! I'm Haley and I'm a physics PhD student West Virginia University and my main area of research is astronomy. When I'm not doing research, I like to run, snuggle with my cats, and bake! I've loved baking since I was little and have learned a lot from my mom who loves to cook. I've always loved baking but haven't really had much time for it. I'm in my 3rd year of my PhD and life as a grad student is crazy. My main focus is pulsars, which are super dense, rapidly-rotating neutron stars that emit radio radiation. I've been studying these objects since I was a freshman at the University of Vermont and love them so much.

During Christmas break after my first year of grad school, my family started watching "The Great British Baking Show." I love the Food Network and cooking shows but fell in love with the layout of this show and the challenges. This past winter after my last written qualifying exam was finished, I set my sights on baking an eton mess (meringue, whipped cream, and strawberries) because of what I had seen on the show. I've always been fairly creative with baking and had gotten more into it during my second year thanks to the fact that I had an audience that welcomed any baked good (my boyfriend Mitch!). After the eton mess (which was DELICIOUS), I began to use the show as inspiration. After taking on everything from croissants (a hit) to cannoli (yeah, about those....) to macarons (either a hit or a miss), I began to try more and more challenging things. I always make sure to bring extras to our department secretary as she loves sweets and does a lot for the department, so I like to show appreciation! Multiple times from her I've gotten comments about how I'm "wasting my talents with astrophysics" and "that I should open a bakery." 

One of my favorite things about being a scientist is outreach. I work at a planetarium and love teaching people about astronomy. I love participating in programs like Skype a Scientist and Letters to a Pre-Scientist and doing simple things like sharing pulsar facts on social media. I get so excited about science and think it's so cool and want to share that with others!

The idea for the Pulsars and Profiteroles Project came as a culmination of all of the above. I've always loved writing and combining that my baking adventures with teaching people about a subject I love seemed perfect! In this blog, I'll start off with a little blurb about something pulsar-related and then share the results of my baking that week. As you can see from below, I'm a bit of a messy cook (I believe that picture was taken after a gingerbread catastrophe in high school), so each post will feature a "kitchen destruction factor" where my boyfriend will rank just how disastrous the bake was on our kitchen. Thanks so much for following and stay tuned for weekly updates on The Pulsars and Profiteroles Project!
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  • HOME
  • ABOUT
  • MY RESEARCH
  • THE CHALLENGES
  • RECIPE ARCHIVE