Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share (12 page)

Once you’ve got all your images ready, it’s time to get the book ready. So prep the book itself by taking thirteen sheets of construction paper and punching three holes along the left side. Punch the holes before any real work is done, or you may end up punching holes over a picture or letter. Once that’s done, have your kids use crayons or markers to start writing one letter of the alphabet at the top of each side of each page. Just be sure the color’s dark enough to show up.

My kids also wanted to include a front cover, back cover, title page, and dedication page. So I made sure to include four more sheets in the process.

Now comes the fun part. Start making piles of your superhero pictures, grouping them by letter. When you have all the
A
name superheroes together, grab a glue stick and start attaching them to the
A
page of the book. Since our pages were double-sided, we did half the alphabet first and let those pages dry before flipping them over and finishing off the second half of the alphabet.

As long as the pictures don’t cover any of the holes in the spine, you’re fine. We tried to cram as many pictures as we could onto each page, even if some of the pictures had to come off the paper to do so. It just adds a bit of 3-D magic to the fun.

When all the pictures are glued on and dry, have your kids make a cover. Be sure they include a title and a byline so they can give themselves the proper author credits. A title page is just another excuse to write the title again and fit a few more pictures. Same goes for the dedication page, which gives your little geeklets a chance to act like a real author and dedicate the book to a friend or loved one.

The final step is just putting everything together. Literally. Cut out a length of yarn and pull it through one set of holes, and then tie it into a neat bow. Repeat two more times and you’re all set. One handy dandy “Superhero ABC Book” ready to read, or to be read to you by your little ones. Just be careful turning the pages, and always have a glue stick handy to re-adhere any pictures that find their way free.

If your kids enjoyed making it, you can very easily substitute any other theme based on their interests. Baseball players, video game characters, cartoons, food, etc. Good luck!

M
odel building is a geeky practice par exellence. From snap-tight car and plane kits to Warhammer dioramas or Eiffel Towers made from
LEGO
bricks or toothpicks, the obsessive drive to represent something large on a smaller scale, out of alternate materials, has been with us for a long, long time.

But there’s one kind of model building where two different corners of geekery come together. If you and your kids are food lovers, you can bring a little bit of that passion into the world of model building with this project.

The go-to reference for this kind of project is the hit show
Ace of Cakes
. Star cake artist Duff Goldman and his team build what are, in effect, elaborate models out of cake and cake-related products, and if you notice they all are, to one degree or another, geeks. (Okay, we’ll admit, one or two of them come across as hipsters, but we’ll cut them some slack for the amazing work they do.)

Building a model of something is a task that falls into the lap of every kid at some stage of their educational career. In California, fourth graders have to build a model of a California mission as part of their graduation requirements. In some school districts in Pennsylvania, students may choose to build a historical model to meet specific graduation requirements. And countless other schools urge their students to re-create historical buildings, places, or events in scale replica form as a means of imparting a deeper understanding of a specific subject or era.

Usually these projects are built with Styrofoam or clay with plastic animals or people on a foam core board and are . . . uninspired. But if we add some creativity, we can achieve something much more interesting and fun (not to mention tasty). We can make our models out of cake.

This project is based on the actual model of a California mission my son Eli and I built for his fourth-grade history requirement. Eli has been a foodie since a very young age—he loves to watch Alton Brown and
Iron Chef America
just as much as any cartoon or baseball game. It was his idea to tackle this model in cake. When my wife and I heard the idea, we beamed with pride.

When you’re planning a model out of cake, especially a model of a building, there are three key materials to use: cake, generic puffed rice cereal treats, and fondant. You’ll use the cake for most major structures (in our example, the large solid structure of the mission church) and use the generic puffed rice cereal treats for most of the other structures—as it’s very easy to mold and cut into custom shapes. Fondant is the covering that makes everything look smooth and finished.

When you’re planning your model, you need to decide which materials are going to be right for the different parts of the structure. Basic geometric shapes can be done well with cake, since you can stack a number of small sheet cakes on top of each other and then use a serrated knife to cut and shape it. You should create more delicate or elaborate structural elements like columns or arches out of the generic puffed rice cereal treats since it can be molded almost like a very grainy clay and has some useful structural properties; it can be molded into shapes, like columns and arches, or other decorative three-dimensional features.

A California mission is a fairly simple setup. There is a main church building—geometrically a rectangular prism with a triangular prism on top—and then the friars’ quarters and other facilities built off to the side of the church in a square surrounding a courtyard with a garden and fountain in the middle. These side buildings usually have verandas, or shaded walkways with arched openings. Our plan was to build the church itself in cake, and the buildings around the courtyard in generic puffed rice cereal treats, then cover everything in a layer of white fondant, which would end up looking very similar to the white-washed stucco common to the missions.

1. Start by making four cakes, all cooked in simple rectangular baking pans. This can be from the cheapest boxed yellow cake mix you can find, or something nicer, depending on one major decision: whether or not you want to eat the cake. If the final product of the project is going to be a model for a school assignment, it’s likely it will sit out for days after completion, meaning it won’t be fit for eating and you don’t have to worry as much about taste. But if you want to have your cake and eat it, too, it never hurts to upgrade your ingredients.

2. If you are mixing your own icing, do it now—make two batches of white icing and set them aside to act as cement during the construction phase.

3. While the cakes are baking, mix up five batches of generic puffed rice cereal treat mix (not naming any trademarked brand names here, nosireebob!), also molding each one into a baking pan so that when they set, they can easily be cut into blocks.