Incomplete Project #49

I'm sure many men with sympathise with my plight for there are many times when my my wife causes a rapid and unexpected constriction in my pants. I find my wallet tightens every time she purchases the exorbitantly priced Kuih Lapis - the traditional Indonesian layer cake.

After some research, I now understand the high price - it is extremely labour intensive and consists of innumerable egg yokes and blocks of butter. A person's arteries harden just reading the ingredient list.

To ease my wallet tension, I thought about home baking the layer cake. A bit of recipe hunting showed that it is technically doable ingredient-wise but it is horrible when it comes to the baking process - it is built up one 3mm layer at a time. No way would I stand there loading and unloading an oven for an hour just to make one cake. Has to be a better way.

Further unsatisfactory Google-foo led me to believe that there is no quick and easy way to produce such a cake so in my mind, it is a perfect opportunity to implement some automation. As the sad TeslaBot is not available, it falls to me to come up with something myself. A Malaysian University research paper (view here) gave me the lowdown on how this is actually a difficult problem to solve. Sounds like the perfect sort of project for me to add to my "Incomplete Project" pool.

My goal is to produce a multistage rotating cake layering system. It automaticallly builds up the cake layer by layer just as is done in the manual process. The main feature is the baking side is hands free. The down side is that even making the batter is quite a job so definitely not worth the effort for one cake.

In my mind's eye, everything is doable and the one tricky bit is the baking. A failure here is a blocker for the entire project. To that end, it was time to open the constricted wallet and fork out for some quartz heat lamps to see what they can do. I purchased 2 of these 400W lamps:

That should be good enough for a start. I envisage needing 4 of them to get an even cake heat coverage. Now I am not sure how dangerous reflected IR light is so I do feel a tad uncomfortable testing it out (I did find one research paper where a woman suffered eye damage by continually looking into a heat lamp but that seemed an extreme situation [view here])

But still, I was somewhat cautious but not so cautious as to connect the earth wire to all the exposed metal bits... I could not find a ring terminal for the life of me. Sure, in a pinch I could have used an alligator clip but that has only just occurred to me...

It does get nice and toasty very quickly say about 20 seconds. I did wonder if the meter was reading the reflected light (ie the light source temp) and not the actual metal pan tempurature. You need to be aware of reflected vs absorbed light. So just to be sure, I tried again but took the temp with the lamp off and proved the meter reading was correct.

So far so good, now time to take it up a notch and get something a little more practical.

I'm still somewhat concerned about escaping light/thermal conductance causing unexpected/expensive damage so it's stacked layer on layer with some dark pans in the middle to absorb the light. Shiny stainless steel is not always one's friend.

And now for a temperature test with 2 lamps in the baking test rig.

Works a treat! That was enough for one day - not motivated to go shopping for heaps of eggs and butter. The batter test can wait for tomorrow... (and we all know tomorrow never comes)