The magic cake of Nutella will stop her beer drinking so we can have better western blots!

You may ask what is Nutella?  That would not be too surprising.  Nutella is the Euro-world's version of peanut butter. It is a concoction of hazelnuts paste, chocolate and sugar that families on other continents serve their kids like families in the US serve their kids peanut butter...assuming that some kid with a nut allergy is not around in which case you have to evacuate whatever building you are in. Most Americans when they first experience Nutella are not impressed and think it is a tad disgusting much in the same way that Nutella families think peanut butter is disgusting when they first experience it. It is a mutual lack of admiration society.  Nutella is gradually becoming more accepted here across the pond which is fine.  It is after all a better choice than Marmite another European spread that truly is disgusting.

The world famous Nutella - if you think this is digusting...

then stay away from this.  Yeast Extract? That's what we feed bacteria!!

Our student cake for the day is Nutella Magic Cake.  Isn't that a great name? You can't help but be excited about a Magic Cake and wonder what kind of magic is in store. Once the cake is baked, however the magic is over.  This is called a "Magic Cake" because during the baking the batter settles into three distinguishable layers. From one layer of batter three layers of cake magically appear.  Could anything be any more fun?  To make it even more fun our student baker added a layer of bananas and some cocoa powder on the top!

Our Nutella Magician for the day!

Cake of Nutella Magic with a banana flourish!

Not a bad looking cake!

Great cakescape - banana and choco powder for the top!

The response to this cake was very good.  There were quite a number of Nutella fans in the bunch.  As we had some canned whipped cream left over we sliced this cake up and served it with small floret of whipped cream.  When you tasted the cake the dominant flavor was from the bananas.  The top layer turned out to be like cake although our baker felt that it had fallen and was not as "crunchy" as it had been when it was first finished. The other two layers, which were not easy to distinguish, had the density and taste of a chocolate pudding and for that reason the added chantilly was a good idea. Even without, the magical cake of Nutella went over very well and get a 4 and a half star rating.

Note the three magical layers in this commcercial photo!

If you look real close you can see distinguish the two bottom layers...so the magic was done!

We had some of the usual sob stories about people and their Western Blots not working. There was also a need for more of the chemiluminescent reagent needed to read them. Just to be a wag I pointed out that the recent seminar on infrared imaging was supposed to obviate our need for all these supplies and that people should use the instruments.  That prompted all sorts of comments about how they are not allowed to use them and we should have our own machine to use.  The response to that was if they stopped using the reagents and film we could save enough money to get the machine.  Then folks started volunteering other ways money was wasted and could be saved. This led to and aforementioned affection for drinking on the part of one of our summer gang and we blamed the lack of our own machine on that habit...if only she would stop drinking we could save $50,000 and get our own machine.  That's a lot of drinking!

If our colleague hadn't drunk all these...

We could get one of these and our Western Blots would be awesome!

I'll get her to lay off the beer because I want that machine!