Every grad student in my department goes through something called the A exam, aka candidacy or qualifying exams. Its a mildly terrifying meeting with your committee where you give a short presentation and then sit around for a few hours while the professors on your committee can ask you anything about your project, your field, or science in general. Questions can range from “How would you conduct an experiment to test [fill in the blank]” to “What’s your favorite nematode and why?” to “What was the first R gene discovered?.” (My favorite nematode is Bursaphelenchus xylophilus, in case you were wondering).
At the end of the exam your committee deliberates and decides whether you can continue on with your program (becoming a PhD candidate) or if you should end with a Masters degree or if you need to retake the exam at a later date after fulfilling some more requirements. While most people pass, the exam is pretty stressful for most people, myself included.
So what better way to prepare than by baking. While it certainly isn’t required to bring refreshments to the exam, its a bit of a tradition and baking gives me something to take my mind off of the impending exam.
For my exam I went with something a bit goofy that wasn’t too difficult to bake and I thought my committee would appreciate. I work on Xanthomonas, a gooey yellow rod shaped bacteria that causes disease in many crops, including banana and cabbage, the ones that I work on.
Xanthomonas looks like the A bacteria with rod shaped with one flagella (like a tail)
So I ended up baking one of my favorite desserts. Eclairs. I filled them with a nice french vanilla pastry cream (yellow), dipped them in passion fruit glaze and made tiny chocolate flagella. A few of the ended up with candy eyes as well.
Eclairs
Ingredients
- 1 cup flour
- 1 cup water
- 1 stick butter
- 4 eggs
- 1 recipe of your favorite pastry cream or whipped cream
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 400. Put water and butter in a medium sauce pan and bring to a boil. All the butter should be melted by the time the water boils.
- Dump in the cup of flour and mix vigorously with a wooden sppon until the dough forms a ball and sticks a little to the bottom of the pan
- Dump the dough ball into a stand mixer and mix on medium for a minute or two. Then add eggs one at a time.
- Pipe into 1-2 inch lines on a piece of parchment paper and bake at 400 until they turn golden brown but aren't burnt on the bottoms.
- Remove from oven and poke a hole in each one to allow steam to escape
- Put your cream in a pastry bag with a large tip and insert into one end of each eclair once cooled. Fill with cream.
And in the end I passed my A exam and my committee enjoyed the eclairs almost as much as I enjoyed making them. Now time to start thinking about what to make for my dissertation defense…