The Adventures of Neurosquid: Brain Cake and Burning Quads

It's been a busy week here in Salt Lake City! Last Thursday, my labmate (and good friend) Melissa defended her Ph.D. thesis. She is now officially part of the Ph.D. club!! Here she is emerging from her defense meeting...

It's a little blurry, but I love it!

Our fabulous mentor, Kristen, threw a party in Melissa's honor on Friday evening. In discussing the party preparations, I somehow managed to get myself nominated to make a brain cake for the occasion. Given my limited artistic abilities, I immediately "volunteered" Jeremy to assist me in this task. Being the fabulous husband that he is, Jeremy rearranged his work schedule so that he could be home Friday afternoon to tackle the brain cake with me. We decided to go with a red velvet cake and homemade cream cheese frosting. I documented the cake building process so I could shamelessly brag about his talents on my blog.

Step 1: Flatten the bottom cake to allow the top cake to sit somewhat level

Step 2: Carve a brain shape

Step 3: Add a layer of crumb-coat frosting

Aside from baking the cakes, I was relatively useless until this point. Right about here, Jeremy turned to me for "scientific consulting" regarding the placement of the "squiggles" (aka. gyri/sulci). I must say, while not 100% anatomically accurate, the finished product was quite impressive!

Tada!!

We realized that the brain cake wasn't going to be large enough to feed a giant crowd, so we also threw together a sheet cake to feed the masses. Jeremy's artistic abilities were put to the test when I asked him to try and draw a neuron and a rat in icing, but he prevailed!

Almost too cool to eat.

The party was lovely, and I think Melissa enjoyed finally getting to relax after months of stress leading up to her defense. A great time was had by all!

Kristen roasting/toasting Melissa.

Melissa, showing off her Super Woman gift bag :)

The lab!!

I love this photo because not a single one of us is looking at the

camera or doing what we're supposed to. Classic Keefe Lab!

The weather was lovely last week and on Saturday I let Jeremy convince me to go on a crazy trail run with him. I haven't been doing nearly enough training for the 25k that I'm signed up for this weekend, so I thought it would be good for my psyche to get out and do 9-10 miles last weekend. What I didn't consider is that my husband is insane, and runs hills that most people wouldn't want to hike. We took off from our house, and headed up to the towers in the foothills behind Ensign Peak. We went all the way to the upper towers (a trip I'd only been on once before). On the way up, Jeremy started putting crazy ideas in my head about taking the pipeline trail down into City Creek rather than going back the way we had originally planned. "It's fun", he told me. "You've never done pipeline", he said... "You can cross it off your list of trails to run before we move". Somehow I let myself fall prey to this logic. Next thing I know, we're headed down a mile of SCREAMING downhill. The kind of downhill that you run because it's impossible to walk. The kind of downhill where it's everything you can do to stay in control and not fall tumbling to the bottom. He was right, it was fun, but man did I pay for it. My quads were burning for the next 3 days. Today, Wednesday, I can finally go down stairs without wincing. Why do I let him talk me into this madness?! On the bright side, it was a gorgeous spring day and I had a blast running the trails with my two favorite creatures!!