When getting this blog ready, I realized that I’m a habitual
completely-unrelated-things
combiner. Japanese and Environmental Science? Who wouldn’t double major
in this! Kanye, Blink 182, and Tay Tay all in a row in a mix? Now we’re
jamming. Extremely attractive 23 year old man, driving a soccer-mom ready Mini Van?
Yea you get it.
Thus was born the idea for Sustainable TechNomogy, using my
love of baking to help raise awareness about awesome new sustainable
technologies, by, well, baking them! I plan on updating bi or tri Monthly, and
welcome any suggestions for technologies or making the blog better.
Now let’s bake to the future!
Rain Barrel Cupcakes
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| Looking delicious. And there's even a cupcake on top! |
For those of you that don’t know, I’ve been doing my intern
magic over at the West Michigan Environmental Action Council (or WMEAC,
pronounced we-me-yak) since December. WMEAC concentrates a lot of its power
towards alleviating the storm water runoff issue in West Michigan. Water from
urban areas isn’t reabsorbed into the ground, but instead picks up many pollutants
on its way to Lake Michigan. Personally, I love the word “brackish”, but would
love to see the Lake with the best beaches in the world as clean as possible.
For my first sustainable technomogy I decided to make rain
barrels, a technology close to the hearts of every WMEAC staffer and intern.
Beautiful isn’t it! The edible version of the food grade
barrel is made out of angel food cake covered in vanilla buttercream frosting.
While a plastic barrel is crunchy and bad for your teeth, this homemade buttercream
was smooth and... bad for your teeth. I drew on lines using a few crushed
blackberries I had sitting around to give the barrels a top and bottom.
A rain barrel can hold up to 500lb of water when full! While
I would have had a lot of fun pumping 500 lb of the blueberry cream filling
into these bad boys, physics was not on my side… this time. Made out of
blueberry yogurt and cool whip mixed together, this light filling represents a
sort of apology, an apology for how bad the buttercream frosting is for your
body (NO REGRETS).
What makes rain barrels so cool is that you are using water
that would normally be lost to water your lawn, saving you water piped in from
elsewhere while being nice to our rivers lakes and streams. A galvanized steel
blueberry is placed at the bottom of a rainbarrel that can attach to a hose.
The barrel uses the pressure of all the water above the blueberry in order to
allow you to water your plants/garden/lawn!
As a finishing touch I put in a drain spout, (just in case you
have a particularly rainy day and water needs to flow out of the barrel), along
with a gutter system, to pipe in all that delicious Dihydrogen Monoxide (hurr hurr hurr). In real life rain barrels will only run you around 20$, in cupcake life, they are priceless.
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| Another intern, Karie, going food-waste neutral on a cupcake. |
And that’s that! Hopefully you enjoyed that post. Feel free
to leave comments, questions, suggestions, or pictures of pandas doing really
cute stuff (mostly the last please).
On a serious note, while rain barrels definitely help
alleviate stormwater runoff, raising awareness and making sure your
representatives are aware that you value Michigan’s water resources is the most
important thing you can do to keep our water clean!
Check out https://wmeac.org/water/rain-barrel-workshops/ for
more info on rain barrels or to sign up for a workshop.
-Adam
