MIT Students Create An Ice Cream Printer
[Philip Lelyveld comment: this type of flash-freeze ice cream was tried a few years ago for 'popcorn' ice cream. Creating custom shapes will be interesting.]
Three students at MIT, Kyle Hounsell, Kristine Bunker, and David Donghyun Kim, have created a homemade ice cream printer that extrudes soft serve and immediately freezes it so that it can be layered on a cooled plate.
The system is a proof-of-concept right now but they were able to print some clever shapes out of the sweet, sweet cream.
The team built the printer as part of Professor John Hart’s class in additive manufacturing. They used a Solidoodle printer to control the plate and the stream and froze the ice-cream as it came out with liquid nitrogen. As you can imagine, it melted quite often, resulting in a pool of sweet, edible sadness. As a man who can eat three gallons of ice cream in a sitting, I could imagine this thing just 3D printing all over my head.
See the full story here: http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/16/mit-students-create-an-ice-cream-printer/?ncid=tcdaily