AS FEATURED WITH NPR + FORBES
On New Year’s Eve in 2018, our chartered military C-130 cargo plane landed in Antarctica and I immediately began my work at McMurdo Station, the largest research base on the continent. After-hours, scientists explained their work at public science lectures where their vivacious passion for microscopic diatoms, atmospheric photon counts, the sex lives of prehistoric fish, and satellite sea ice measurements only made sense to me by reformatting their data as cake layers, tiers, and fondant decorations. I saw their science in sugar and I was enraptured.
After my contract ended, I flew 10,000 miles north to Alaska and set up a makeshift art studio in a log cabin, which I had to myself with $1200 of fondant, tools, and cake decorating materials. I spent a full week researching paleontology, microbiology, glaciology, polar operations, and aerospace engineering. After reading scientific blogs, watching educational videos, and digging into Antarctic outreach articles, I began creating the cakes I had originally sketched out on the ice. By reimagining the images and personal stories shared during science teams’ lectures, I was able to make the vast abundance of research taking place at the bottom of the world completely edible. These cakes captured the attention of a national audience with the support of NPR, Forbes, and the Mystic Seaport Museum.
2019 brought a job offer at a NASA research camp, where space scientists were sending their research projects 130,000+ feet into the atmosphere, suspended below massive balloons that can each fit an entire football stadium within. After using 60# of my 85# weight allotment to bring fondant and cake tools down to the continent with me, I pulled multiple all-nighters translating this science into sugar. Meanwhile, the research teams waited for perfectly clear weather that would allow their balloon to reach its maximum altitude and safely navigate rare circumpolar winds around the South Pole. At 3am, we manipulated sugar paste to replicate our galaxy's magnetic waves. Using edible dyes and Everclear, I hand-painted a thermal map overlay atop that 3-D sugar that showed warmer areas where high-energy particles would most likely collide and form new stars. Together, we presented our finished edible diagram at the McMurdo Alternative Arts Gallery on Antarctica's Ross Island. Art became science and science became art.
Learn more about this Antarctic science communication here:
Feature article in NPR
Lecture with the Mystic Seaport Museum
American Polar Society featured artist (free digital PDF available upon request)
"Scientific Research As Cakes" in Forbes
Photo with the BLAST-TNG space science team
Interview with Speaking Broadly
After my contract ended, I flew 10,000 miles north to Alaska and set up a makeshift art studio in a log cabin, which I had to myself with $1200 of fondant, tools, and cake decorating materials. I spent a full week researching paleontology, microbiology, glaciology, polar operations, and aerospace engineering. After reading scientific blogs, watching educational videos, and digging into Antarctic outreach articles, I began creating the cakes I had originally sketched out on the ice. By reimagining the images and personal stories shared during science teams’ lectures, I was able to make the vast abundance of research taking place at the bottom of the world completely edible. These cakes captured the attention of a national audience with the support of NPR, Forbes, and the Mystic Seaport Museum.
2019 brought a job offer at a NASA research camp, where space scientists were sending their research projects 130,000+ feet into the atmosphere, suspended below massive balloons that can each fit an entire football stadium within. After using 60# of my 85# weight allotment to bring fondant and cake tools down to the continent with me, I pulled multiple all-nighters translating this science into sugar. Meanwhile, the research teams waited for perfectly clear weather that would allow their balloon to reach its maximum altitude and safely navigate rare circumpolar winds around the South Pole. At 3am, we manipulated sugar paste to replicate our galaxy's magnetic waves. Using edible dyes and Everclear, I hand-painted a thermal map overlay atop that 3-D sugar that showed warmer areas where high-energy particles would most likely collide and form new stars. Together, we presented our finished edible diagram at the McMurdo Alternative Arts Gallery on Antarctica's Ross Island. Art became science and science became art.
Learn more about this Antarctic science communication here:
Feature article in NPR
Lecture with the Mystic Seaport Museum
American Polar Society featured artist (free digital PDF available upon request)
"Scientific Research As Cakes" in Forbes
Photo with the BLAST-TNG space science team
Interview with Speaking Broadly
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Photo by Stephen Allinger
ANTARCTIC MIDWINTER
Replica of Ernest Shackleton's 1915 expedition vessel, Endurance, being crushed in the ice.
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Presented for McMurdo Station's 64th consecutive Midwinter solstice celebration on the dark evening of June 20, 2020.
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Staying true to Shackleton's rations (because cake insides need to tell just as much of a story as the outside), I honored his leadership by stacking dark chocolate cake between seven layers of Shackleton whiskey buttercream and a homemade "expedition biscuit" toasted crumble. Our New Zealand Kiwi friends at the neighboring Scott Base were kind enough to share their kitchen (and a pound of real butter!) in exchange for "Spratts x Patent" historic biscuits for their Midwinter celebration too.
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Presented for McMurdo Station's 64th consecutive Midwinter solstice celebration on the dark evening of June 20, 2020.
--
Staying true to Shackleton's rations (because cake insides need to tell just as much of a story as the outside), I honored his leadership by stacking dark chocolate cake between seven layers of Shackleton whiskey buttercream and a homemade "expedition biscuit" toasted crumble. Our New Zealand Kiwi friends at the neighboring Scott Base were kind enough to share their kitchen (and a pound of real butter!) in exchange for "Spratts x Patent" historic biscuits for their Midwinter celebration too.
“Everything I learned, my brain instantly processed into cake format,” says McAdoo. “Ascending and descending data sets or systems become different sized stacked tiers. The ever-changing ice break patterns that I watched morph every day looked like massive sheets of fondant. I saw NASA Operation IceBridge data as future time-lapsed cake decor videos.”
- Rose McAdoo, as quoted in Forbes
- Rose McAdoo, as quoted in Forbes
"Whereas a scientist might use a PowerPoint with graphs as her props, McAdoo reaches for flour, eggs, sugar, and fondant."
- Emily Vaughn, NPR
- Emily Vaughn, NPR
Clockwise, from top left:
1. Weddell seal bust (on its back is a fondant tracking device which collects information about the circumpolar deepwater - a large, dense under-ice warm water current — and its effects on Antarctica’s fragile west ice shelf)
2. Crary Laboratory cake (includes a data set from the New York Times as well as sugar replicas of Tritoniella belli nudibranchs, Marseniopis mollis gastropods, Astrotoma agassizii and Ophiacantha antarctica brittle stars, and Colossendeis australis anthropods, all made to scale)
3. Unmolding an isomalt replica of a glacial ice core, complete with ancient air bubbles and striations in snow deposit
4. 3D sugar map of Vela-C's magnetic fields with a hand-painted overlay of thermal map imaging showing the areas most likely to support
future star formation (this image was captured by the BLAST-TNG science team and digitally rendered by Dr. Laura Fissel)
1. Weddell seal bust (on its back is a fondant tracking device which collects information about the circumpolar deepwater - a large, dense under-ice warm water current — and its effects on Antarctica’s fragile west ice shelf)
2. Crary Laboratory cake (includes a data set from the New York Times as well as sugar replicas of Tritoniella belli nudibranchs, Marseniopis mollis gastropods, Astrotoma agassizii and Ophiacantha antarctica brittle stars, and Colossendeis australis anthropods, all made to scale)
3. Unmolding an isomalt replica of a glacial ice core, complete with ancient air bubbles and striations in snow deposit
4. 3D sugar map of Vela-C's magnetic fields with a hand-painted overlay of thermal map imaging showing the areas most likely to support
future star formation (this image was captured by the BLAST-TNG science team and digitally rendered by Dr. Laura Fissel)
Photo by Johnny Chiang
BAKING ANTARCTICA IN ANTARCTICA
Working for the United States Antarctic Program is the opportunity of a lifetime - feeding up to 1,000 science support staff
on the continent's largest research base and hiking across the ice in conditions that reached negative 75 degrees with 45 mph winds.
Inspired by the original cake found preserved in the ice from polar explorer Robert Scott's 1910-1913 Terra Nova expedition,
this 60+ pound loaf was a dense, rich, boozy fruitcake filled with dark chocolate (a high-caloric staple in expedition provisions)
and coated in white chocolate glaze (which I was only able to use after calculating rations that had to last another eight months).
For our 2019 end-of-season send-off party, McMurdo's waste manager showed up with trail marker flags to line the path from the building entrance to the cake itself, and we popped champagne to bid our friends farewell.
The next morning, McMurdo sent off its last flight and our population dwindled to a mere 199 people.
Scott and Shackleton would have received the biggest pieces, if I'd only had the chance.
on the continent's largest research base and hiking across the ice in conditions that reached negative 75 degrees with 45 mph winds.
Inspired by the original cake found preserved in the ice from polar explorer Robert Scott's 1910-1913 Terra Nova expedition,
this 60+ pound loaf was a dense, rich, boozy fruitcake filled with dark chocolate (a high-caloric staple in expedition provisions)
and coated in white chocolate glaze (which I was only able to use after calculating rations that had to last another eight months).
For our 2019 end-of-season send-off party, McMurdo's waste manager showed up with trail marker flags to line the path from the building entrance to the cake itself, and we popped champagne to bid our friends farewell.
The next morning, McMurdo sent off its last flight and our population dwindled to a mere 199 people.
Scott and Shackleton would have received the biggest pieces, if I'd only had the chance.
Photo by Jonathan Foster
Photo by Corey Robinson
