2014 Holiday Special post by Hilary Chase.

by Hilary M. Chase.

We are excited to showcase our first ever blog post by a Geiger group member. I thought what better way to showcase the entire group, and to also truly get into the holiday spirit, than by blogging about our annual holiday party.

Every December, the group throws a wonderful holiday party at Franz’s house. This consists of a potluck dinner, a holiday cookie competition, and a white elephant gift swap. I am a second year in the group, and although this was only my second holiday party, the week leading up to the cookie competition this year felt a bit more competitive in comparison to last year. That’s because the two greatest, most legendary cookie competitors of the Geiger group, Stephanie Walter and Jennifer Achtyl, have graduated with their PhDs, leaving the ultimate prize category of Best in Show up for grabs! In addition to Best in Show, we have the opportunity to win many other categories (i.e. Best in Environmental Chemistry, Best in Taste, Best in Science, Best in lasers and many more); but deep down, I think we all wanted that Best in Show prize.

There were eight cookie entries this year. Juli (fourth year) and Sarah (fifth year) created an INCREDIBLE cookie replica of the Philae comet lander being invaded by Despicable Me minions. The display had it all! Lights! Cookies! Rice crispies! Marshmallows! Chocolate! Minions! This impressive cookie display won the following categories: Best in Show, Best in Science, Best in Geochemistry, Most Fun, as well as the “Favorite” prize of Franz’s children Anja, and Max– and family friend Alex.

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Juli and Sarah’s impressive minion cookie display, well deserving of Best in Show!

Mona is another fifth year group member and she made sugar cookies. What made them extremely impressive was that she hand-cut the cookies to look like the Chicago skyline, an ode to our beautiful (and quite cold!) city. She won the following categories: Best in Science, Engineering, Fancy, and Community Spirit.

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Mona’s edible Chicago skyline.

Franz really went all out, by constructing a graphene sheet made out of chocolate-dipped pretzel sticks and chocolate covered raisins. This graphene sheet had a defect capped with hydroxyl groups that collaborative work shows transfers aquated protons with low energy barriers. He won Best in Science, Interfaces, and Use of Chocolate.

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Franz’s edible graphene sheet.

Laura and Mary Alice are our third year group members, and they also teamed up to create a unique cookie display. Their display consisted of 3D cookie trees and cookie solar panels, with a blue frosting stream. Real trees were not harmed in the making of this cookie, although we did destroy and subsequently devour the cookie trees. I think Mary Alice may have been inspired by her recent trip to Brazil to collect secondary organic aerosol material from the Amazon, as a part of the GoAmazon2014/15 campaign led by Harvard’s Scot Martin. They won the following categories: Best in Atmospheric Chemistry, Environmental, Politics, and Lilo’s (Franz’s middle child) Favorite.

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Laura and Mary Alice’s sweet trees and solar panels.

Alicia is a second year in our group. She made ice cream sandwich cookies- really the best I’ve ever had, because it included bacon! If I could write a whole blog post about bacon I would (forthcoming). She made a bacon salted caramel ice cream (don’t knock it until you try it!), sandwiched between two cookies half dipped in chocolate. She won the following categories: Best in Taste, Best Use of Bacon, and Best in Particles.

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This is me, in pure bacon/chocolate/salted caramel/cookie bliss.

Merve is another fellow second year. She had a great cookie idea, as an ode to experimental reproducibility. She baked the same cookies that she made last year, and they tasted just as delicious this time around. She could reproduce the recipe! Really clever, and we all appreciated the back-story of course. She won the Holiday Spirit category, as well as Best in Science.

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Merve’s cookie recipe was so good that it was reproducible!

Now we are up to my cookies, which were inspired by my interest in chirality. Using carvone as my muse, I prepared a (+)-enantiomer cookie that had caraway seeds on it, and a (–)-enantiomer cookie that had crushed up spearmint candy on it in order to reflect the different odors of the different enantiomers. I won the following categories: Best in Science, Chemistry, Chirality, and Molecules.

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My carvone-inspired chirality cookies.

Mavis is one of our first year members, and she made sugar cookies. No frills, no bacon, no minions- but equally delicious. She won Best in Science and Most Traditional.

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Mavis’s simply delicious cookies.

And last we have Paul, our other first year member. He made Christmas trees with melted lifesaver candies in the middle. They would make fantastic IR-grade optics for sure! For that reason he won Best in Science, Lasers, and IR.

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Paul’s optics cookies (not sold by Spectra Physics).

It was a wonderful and competitive cookie competition- one for the record books, I must say. If you’d like any of the recipes, feel free to contact us. The entire group looks forward to sharing more of our work- beyond cookie decorating- with you in the coming months, so please stay tuned and check back often for new posts. Happy Holidays from the Geiger Group!