3D Cake Creator - 3D Printer that Prints Cakes

While this is still an idea and concept, I must say that it seems to be quite the invention. A man named Joshua Lankford has come up with a 3D printer that prints elaborately designed cakes. He is currently looking to come up with some resources to make this printer a reality, but from the looks of things I could see it being a success, especially within bakeries. It works but printing a layer of cake batter, one at a time, and then slowing feeding it into an oven. Once a portion of the cake is cooked it passes out of the other end of the oven while the newly printed layers enter. Read more about this idea at: http://3dprint.com/12793/3d-cake-creator-printer/

http://3dprint.com/wp-content/upload...keprinter1.jpg

I've baked cakes before, and this seems pretty ridiculous to me. Cake batter doesn't sit where you put it, it flows anywhere it can. If there's no containment, the best it will do is form a pancake. So all this machine will do is -very slowly, since each layer has to bake rather than fry - to stack a bunch of pancakes. I suppose you could make an understructure for the cake pictured eventually, but it would take a lot of hand work with the icing and other garnishes to make it resemble the illustration.

Talk about a half-baked idea!

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com

Why are you constantly promoting crack-pot ideas disguised as 3D Printing developments?
Last week it was the 3D Printer Farm robot that will single handedly solve world hunger, now it's the impossible and uneccessary 3D Cake Printer.

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Originally Posted by awerby

I've baked cakes before, and this seems pretty ridiculous to me. Cake batter doesn't sit where you put it, it flows anywhere it can. If there's no containment, the best it will do is form a pancake. So all this machine will do is -very slowly, since each layer has to bake rather than fry - to stack a bunch of pancakes. I suppose you could make an understructure for the cake pictured eventually, but it would take a lot of hand work with the icing and other garnishes to make it resemble the illustration.

Talk about a half-baked idea!

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com

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I appreciate the feedback, but the commentary accompanying it isn't very constructive.

Since you've worked with cakes before, I'm sure you know that cake batter can be created at various viscosities and different formulations including amount of egg, leavening agent (baking soda), water, sugar, and more. No matter the viscocity, all the aforementioned examples can produce a final product of a sweet, light, fluffy, moist cake.

I admit that the greatest challenge in this design is achieving a fluffy cake layer by layer without running into issues with overbaking, drying out, or misshapen cakes, but they're issues worth working out.

As for icing, it would be another problem that would be worked out, but a solution was proposed in the original article.

I wish you and others would keep an open mind about the breadth of ideas that exist within this still-young industry and this technology. There are far more ugly stories of the follies of men who struck down ideas than there are of dreamers who built up ideas only to fail, test, recalibrate, and come to a working solution.

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Originally Posted by jlankford

Since you've worked with cakes before, I'm sure you know that cake batter can be created at various viscosities and different formulations including amount of egg, leavening agent (baking soda), water, sugar, and more. No matter the viscocity, all the aforementioned examples can produce a final product of a sweet, light, fluffy, moist cake.

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I would love to see that recipe. Not even for the purposes of 3D printing, but just to have a fluffy, edible cake batter that can hold its form without needing a pan to hold it in. That alone would revolutionize cake making.

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Originally Posted by Feign

I would love to see that recipe. Not even for the purposes of 3D printing, but just to have a fluffy, edible cake batter that can hold its form without needing a pan to hold it in. That alone would revolutionize cake making.

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Here are some ideas:

1.) Set the oven to a high temp (500 Fahrenheit or more). Formulate the batter to bake quickly without getting crunchy upon impact with the (now hot) platform or existing cake. The cake will then cool as the platform lowers.
2.) We already have a baking medium that holds its form quite well. Dough. Extruding a sweet, buttery, sugary dough with a lot of chemical leavening (baking soda) could create a dough scaffolding that would bake into the intended shape.

This idea is just an idea with a proposed way of executing it. Talking about the "How might this work" is why I even bothered posting it on hackaday.

Okay, in that case, you might want to go a different route, instead of a large radiative heater around the build platform, have a directed infrared heater that follows the extruder tip and partially bakes the batter just after it is stuck to the lower layer. This is similar to the earlier printers of Dirk Vander Kooij, which used a curable styrofoam and a set of heat guns around the nozzle to cure the "crust" of the foam so fast that the printer could make nearly unlimited overhangs very quickly.

Also, the method used by the 3D Systems ChefJet printer could also be used for most baked goods. Even cake, in theory... Pre-mixed dry ingredients are laid down one layer at a time and the wet ingredients are sprayed on as binder. After the printing process, the whole thing is baked in a convection oven, which blows off all the excess dry ingredients (which in theory can get re-captured for later use.) I would guess that using cake batter ingredients in it would result in some... interesting outcomes. At best, it seems well suited to crackers and cookies, though they print chocolate on it as well (coco powder and binder being the dry ingredients, and cocoa butter being the wet ingredient.)

Hope this helps.

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Originally Posted by Feign

Okay, in that case, you might want to go a different route, instead of a large radiative heater around the build platform, have a directed infrared heater that follows the extruder tip and partially bakes the batter just after it is stuck to the lower layer. This is similar to the earlier printers of Dirk Vander Kooij, which used a curable styrofoam and a set of heat guns around the nozzle to cure the "crust" of the foam so fast that the printer could make nearly unlimited overhangs very quickly.

Also, the method used by the 3D Systems ChefJet printer could also be used for most baked goods. Even cake, in theory... Pre-mixed dry ingredients are laid down one layer at a time and the wet ingredients are sprayed on as binder. After the printing process, the whole thing is baked in a convection oven, which blows off all the excess dry ingredients (which in theory can get re-captured for later use.) I would guess that using cake batter ingredients in it would result in some... interesting outcomes. At best, it seems well suited to crackers and cookies, though they print chocolate on it as well (coco powder and binder being the dry ingredients, and cocoa butter being the wet ingredient.)

Hope this helps.

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It helps a ton! I saw the chefjet in action at a trade show, but didn't get a good look at it. I think it's time for me to better understand my options. I really appreciate the insight!

Sometimes you need to deconstruct an idea that's not really going to work before you can construct something that will. I'm not trying to crush your dreams here, but you seem to be operating on some fallacious assumptions:

"I'm sure you know that cake batter can be created at various viscosities and different formulations including amount of egg, leavening agent (baking soda), water, sugar, and more. No matter the viscocity, all the aforementioned examples can produce a final product of a sweet, light, fluffy, moist cake."

I don't know that. Cake batter has to be fairly liquid to form cake. Cake recipes are a lot less forgiving than most other types of food products, and correct viscosity is an important part of what makes them work. If it's too thick, or has too much of one ingredient or another, it won't be cake, although it might be a cracker, a sort of omelet or a candy-like product.

"Set the oven to a high temp (500 Fahrenheit or more). Formulate the batter to bake quickly without getting crunchy upon impact with the (now hot) platform or existing cake. The cake will then cool as the platform lowers.

At 500F or more, cake batter won't bake quickly, it will burn on the outside and be raw in the middle. But who knows, maybe you can formulate something that works differently but still forms cake.

2.) We already have a baking medium that holds its form quite well. Dough. Extruding a sweet, buttery, sugary dough with a lot of chemical leavening (baking soda) could create a dough scaffolding that would bake into the intended shape.

Are we talking about cookie dough now? That's not the same thing as cake. And if you've ever tried it, you'd know that doughs with a lot of butter in them spread out a lot when heated, while there's a definite limit to the amount of baking soda that can be added without getting something that tastes like alka-seltzer. As for these other processes, they might make something edible, maybe even cookies, but nothing that would resemble cake as we know it. Spend a little time in the kitchen and try out some of these ideas. You don't need any machinery at this point, just normal kitchen equipment like recipes, an oven, pastry bags and sifters, maybe adding some heat guns and misters if you want to see what results when you add wet ingredients to dry ones or vice-versa. Taste the results, and recalibrate accordingly. You may not come up with a 3D cake printer, but you might arrive at something interesting.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com

Actually, this kind of gave me an idea, make a heat-gun nozzle that directs hot air out across the tip of a nozzle connected to a pastry bag. You would need insulation between the bag tip and the heat gun (and obviously around the whole thing so you don't burn your hands), but once that's smoothed out you would have kind of an equivalent of a pastry-printing pen, where the heat gun can partially cook the crust of the pastry as it is piped into place, holding its form without using a pan. (of course, the whole thing would have to get cooked in a regular oven to get the insides as well. but it would be interlaced with layers of nice, crispy crust)

You know, as long as we're just in the concept stages, at least we can move towards something more buildable in the short-term to test the concept.

...And print errors can just be sold as funnel cake!;)

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Originally Posted by Feign

Actually, this kind of gave me an idea, make a heat-gun nozzle that directs hot air out across the tip of a nozzle connected to a pastry bag. You would need insulation between the bag tip and the heat gun (and obviously around the whole thing so you don't burn your hands), but once that's smoothed out you would have kind of an equivalent of a pastry-printing pen, where the heat gun can partially cook the crust of the pastry as it is piped into place, holding its form without using a pan. (of course, the whole thing would have to get cooked in a regular oven to get the insides as well. but it would be interlaced with layers of nice, crispy crust)

You know, as long as we're just in the concept stages, at least we can move towards something more buildable in the short-term to test the concept.

...And print errors can just be sold as funnel cake!;)

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Wow. I never thought of it this way, but par-cooking the batter like this is probably very much the best way this could work while preserving form - additionally, it gives more flexibility in the baking process to avoid over-baking (formulation would help). A "flash parbaking tip" will allow for cooler oven temperatures, and might help alleviate the worries of getting a crunchy cake.