3D Chocolate Printer

BoxRec writes "Scientists in England have developed a 3D chocolate printer that prints layers of chocolate instead of ink or plastic. 'Now we have an opportunity to combine chocolate with digital technology, including the design, digital manufacturing and social networking. Chocolate has a lot of social purpose, so our intention is to develop a community and share the designs, ideas and experience about it,' says lead scientist Dr Liang Hao."

Comments

MakerBot Frostruder

[wjsteele]

So... they made a Frostruder... which you can buy here: http://store.makerbot.com/toolheads/makerbot-frostruder.html

Bill

CNC frosting / fudge / etc is old stuff in the USA

[vlm]

Scientists in England have developed a 3D chocolate printer

The important part is England. Here in the states this is REALLY old stuff. My mother in law worked at a small bakery in the middle of nowhere a decade ago which had similar machines, that not only squirted chocolate and chocolate frosting, but pretty much all colors of the frosting rainbow. The idea is kids birthday cakes with a licensed TV character made out of chocolate pieces and/or frosting. They also made cool frosting flowers etc on an industrial mass produced scale. Now that I think back, there were three machines, a frosting robot that was vaguely ink-jet-ish in operation including a (then new) windows 95 printer driver and had a huge bed (like sheetcake size), a flower robot which ran under a dos menu system with what a machinist would call a small rotary table, and the chocolate lace robot, don't remember its software, that appears to be what ye limeys have finally reproduced. It was customizable, I believe she once mentioned she could print chocolate lace for wedding cakes with the bride's name knitted into the lace, etc. There was another technology that printed colored sugars, essentially edible cotton candy, that could be applied to cakes for 2-D pictures, almost exactly like laser printer toner is ironed on to etchable PCBs. I have no idea if grannie's bakery was considered leading or trailing edge. Grannie was not exactly a computer scientist, but she none the less used the tools quite effectively.

I haven't talked to her about this stuff in about a decade... Who knows what state of the art in technological cake decoration is like now, probably octopus-like robots with a hundred arms or maybe lasers to carmelize? Maybe realtime taste/smell synthesis while printing, so you can make the frosting rum bottle taste like rum and a frosting whiskey bottle taste like whiskey?

I guess in England it takes scientists with PHDs to re-implement what little old ladies did in the USA decades ago? Next up, English scientists learn how to cook tasty food just like grannie? Or learn to knit?