Twinkies!!!!!!!!!!

[AndrastVitesse]

twinkies project

[ThatReallyHurt]

The Turing test is great... thanks for posting that!

[Larrison]

*laughing* not bad..

Now, I remember one "wet" Saturday night in the dorm courtyard. For variety someone had procured an old used weber grill kettle, and we were using charcoal to barbeque some burgers and hotdogs. Being bored and inebrieated students at a small, but prestigious science & engineering college, we decided we should speed up the process of cooking.

One of my buddies had an old Electrolux cannister vac, that was pretty powerful. Moreover, it was set up so you could plug the hose into the exhaust from the fan and turn it from a vaccuum "sucker" into a "blower". We rigged the hose up to the ash removal port at the bottom of the Weber, and held it in place with a automobile hose clamp, and fired up the motor.

After we stopped coughing from the ash we blew out the top of the grill kettle, we noticed it worked really well at speeding up cooking. Before, the charcoal briquets were glowing dimly red, but now they were firery red and it was *really hot* making the food cook faster. Cool!.

Now I suppose after we had burned through a half bag of charcoal and most of the burgers and dogs, and after about a half keg, we should have stopped. But it was a beautiful night, the fire was going strong and you know, we really could improve the design of this thing. We could get it much hotter. We could make it cook stuff *much* faster. And we had the ingenuity and design skills and components and mechanical dexerity and beer (lots of beer!) to make this happen.

My roomate disappeared on his bike back to the chem building, while I dumped the other half bag of charcoal on the bright red remains of the previous coals to light up. And I dispatched a couple of friends to get more beer and more burgers since a small crowd had gathered around the fire to watch the show -- and the b*stds had pinched all our chips and were working on the rest of the keg.

To make a long story short, I pulled the blower hose off the bottom of the kettle, and rigged a smaller copper tube with a funnel going into one of the top, going into the top of the kettle through one of the air flow control ports on the top. My roommate reappeared with a big thermos bottle of liquid oxygen and we started experiments in "hyper speed cooking".

We found out we could cook a burger in about 5 seconds, although they had a tendency to be black, carbonized hockey pucks if we weren't careful. We'd toss several of them on the grill, close the kettle and pour a couple of slugs of LOX down into the grill. The flames would roar like a rocket engine, and top of the grill would shudder and voila! dinner was done.. However, too much LOX and the top would pop open, ejecting flaming burger projectiles and ash... Fortunately this was on a concrete floored courtyard.

We gave away maybe 3 dozen carbonized burgers over the next hour or so (dorm students will eat anything, as any college food service director will tell you). Much beer was consumed, another few bags of chips appeared,and a good time was had by all. At least that was the case until we burned through the bottom of the kettle. My guess was that the heat and the lox pouring down onto the coals right against the thin metal of the kettle was a bit too much, particularly in one of our heavier 'speed tests'. Right in the middle of the roaring, sizzling fire one side of the bottom blew out in a gush of sparks, flames, ash, and bits of black carbon burger bits. (Did I mention this was on a concrete patio?). The crowd scattered, taking the chips and the rest of the beer with them, while my roommate and I stomped out the embers.

Thus ended our experiment in speed cooking. The grill kettle stayed around for the rest of the year -- you could still cook it in if you were careful about where you put the charcoal. But no one repeated our experiment in forced air or blast-furnace cooking.

[Zelda]

HEHE....I personally like this....
http://www.peepresearch.org/index.html

[InweCiryatan]

Ahhh! Peeps and Twinkies! My arteries and thighs freeze at the thought of those little sugar bombs. Great sites though, I know some people who would love to try these.

[Fencergrl]

Every Christmas, a misguided friend (who never noticed my husband and I tend to eat health food) would always put "Snowballs" in his Christmas basket.

The first time I saw them, (there's two per package) I looked at the ingredients and decided I wasn't brave/stupid enough to put this in my body. As they seemed quite loaded with preservatives, I put them on the shelf to see how long it would last before it rotted.

This became a tradition, every year we put his offering on display and took bets among our family and friends as to when they would go from snowy white to the first hints of green.

The record was May 21st...... 5 months from date of purchase, and approximately 6 months from date of manufacture.... very scary.

[Maeve_Mari]

HEHE....I personally like this....
http://www.peepresearch.org/index.html

Ahhhh, but they didn't try the much reverered and startling experiment of MICROWAVING Peeps! It is a procedure we do often in our home on Easter Morning, almost I a ritual you could say! Peeps grow to quite enourmous proportions, before turning into a flash of fire when they reach their maximum size.

[swordwench]

I used to work for a software company that wasn't having much fun. My officemate and I decided to get a little zany (quelle surprise), and liven the place up just before Easter. We created little invitations that only stated the fact that we were hosting a "peeps show", and handed them out to everyone we worked with, listing only the gathering time and place. They all arrived timidly, unsure of what to expect. With us, that was probably wise.

We had laid out vast stores of small toy parts, fabric samples, props, constuction paper and craft equipment, and package after package of Peeps (and bunnies, too). We were quietly sitting there making our own peep masterpieces, and invited others to do the same and label their artwork. People got very creative! Everyone, from the receptionist to the CEO, stopped in to make something. There was "The Diary of Samuel Peepys", a porcupeep, a really icky "Peep Smear" (microwaved, of course), two peeps in a pod, an ether bunny (impaled on coax cable)... if was great fun. I highly recommend this as a team building exercise! As far as I know, the porcupeep is still sitting on one guy's desk, something like 4 years later, toothpick fragments still sticking out of it. The things have the half life of nuclear waste.

[parrythis]

It is a little known fact that Twinkies spend most of their time sleeping. In the Turing test, it is entirely possible that the Twinkie test subjects were asleep. Since it is extremely difficult to wake a Twinkie from a really sound sleep, the test might be more fair if it was performed with a sleeping human subject. Note that this condition is not an unnatural one for the student, especially if timed after a weekend of partying or during a History class.

I would bet that if the experiment was conducted thusly, it might not be possible to distinguish between the test subjects. This might prove that a Twinkie is at least as sentient as a sleeping student.

[AndrastVitesse]

Voyage of the Peep-o-nauts

[Maeve_Mari]

PEEPS-A-Boo Puff

Ingredients:
MARSHMALLOW PEEPS
Vanilla pudding
1/2 cup butter or margarine
1 cup water
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 eggs
One cup semi-sweet chocolate
2 tablespoons butter or margarine
3 teaspoons light corn syrup
3 teaspoons milk

Directions:
Heat over to 400 degrees
In medium saucepan, melt butter. When melted, add water and bring to a boil.
Add flour and salt at once and stir vigorously.
Cook and stir until mixture forms a ball that doesn't separate.
Remove from heat and cool for about five minutes.
Add eggs one at a time, beating with a wooden spoon after each addition, until smooth.
Drop batter by heaping tablespoons 3" apart onto a greased baking sheet. Shape into ovals with greased fingers.
Bake at 400 degrees for about 30 minutes or until golden brown and puffy.
Remove from oven, split and remove soft dough inside. Cool on wire rack.
Put teaspoon of pudding and a PEEPS into the center of the base and cover.
Prepare chocolate glaze by heating the semisweet chocolate chips, butter or margarine, light corn syrup a milk over low heat in a saucepan.
Stir frequently until melted and smooth.
Spoon glaze over cream puffs and refrigerate until set.

[Maeve_Mari]

Sunflower Cake
Items Needed:

12 Hostess Twinkies
1 Hostess Ding Dong
1/2 cup chocolate morsels
1 can chocolate frosting
1/3 cup milk
DIRECTIONS: Place Ding Dong in center of round platter. Place Twinkies around Ding Dong to form petals. Mix frosting and milk to form thin glaze. Lightly glaze top of the Ding Dong and arrange chocolate morsels in a circular pattern, starting at the center and working out (to look like the seeds in a sunflower). Place remaining glaze in plastic bag or pastry bag and pipe a line of chocolate down the center of each Twinkie! Kids love it...and it's great for a picnic!!

http://www.fencing101.com/gallery/sh...cat/510/page/1

[Westley]

Ahhhh, but they didn't try the much reverered and startling experiment of MICROWAVING Peeps! It is a procedure we do often in our home on Easter Morning, almost I a ritual you could say! Peeps grow to quite enourmous proportions, before turning into a flash of fire when they reach their maximum size.

I tried this once with a twinkie, to see what would happen. It burned. That was it. And then I took it out and the stuff was like napalm. It was superhot and stuck to you and if you tried to wipe it off then you just got more on your hand. I had 3rd degree burns all up and down my arm.

[AndrastVitesse]

here's another peeps website. Omg Theyre everywhere
The lord of the peeps

[Araznal]

I wonder if this research could be used for another twinkie defense?
Does anyone know about that? I forgot the specifics (San Francisco, election, murder, twinkies, ?)

[VorpalCat]

Thus ended our experiment in speed cooking.

Young Jedi, observe the Master and learn:

George Goble (GHG) [Extended Home Page]

and

Home Page


or should that be .....

[Symon]

peeps!!! twinkies!!! we are definetly being deprived over here in the UK!!!

[WhipLash]

er...wat exactly is a peep? or twinkie? anyway...i conclude that ppl who reside in the usa does weird "experiments" on food whereas over here it's more of dry ice bombs, thermite explosive, nitroglycerine.......scary

[swordwench]

er...wat exactly is a peep? or twinkie? anyway...i conclude that ppl who reside in the usa does weird "experiments" on food whereas over here it's more of dry ice bombs, thermite explosive, nitroglycerine.......scary

Peeps are disgusting little sugar-coated marshmallow things formed into shapes approximating bunnies and (mainly) tiny chicks. I don't believe that they are actually edible, though my kids might disagree. Twinkies are sponge-like, tubular cakey things that are shot through with some mysterious cream filling (oddly, with 3 entry wounds on the flat top of the tube). Said "cream filling" is rumored to be mostly crisco (vegetable shortening). Nasty little buggers indeed.

There are actually many people in the US that perform experiments on these food products (using the term food very loosely), some with high-powered explosives, all in the name of science. I'll have to see if I can come up with any interesting links to them.

Also, you can view the actual products - including recipes! - at www.twinkies.com and www.justborn.com.

[Zelda]

Peeps give me killer migraines for some reason - hence why peeps research makes me giggle...revenge of the migraine suffer!