Composite Restorations

The first half of the semester, we've been doing composite preps (AKA drilling the hole for white-colored fillings), but as of two weeks ago, we started restoring (filling the hole) and it is so much fun! I totally love it.  Way more fun and prettier than amalgam (metal fillings).

This is before:

Prep (drilled) on the two middle extracted teeth (class II).
Notice the caries on the 3rd tooth (black rotten spot)

This is after:

Composite Restorations (tooth-colored fillings) - Lingual view

Occlusal view

And here's one more tooth:

Before: Note the decalcification on the middle tooth (white lines)

During: Cut it down to imitate a fracture (class IV)

After: Then built it back up - no more white lines!
(My mesial contact is too narrow.)

Isn't dentistry so cool?
I'm so blessed to be studying and doing what I love.
God, you da best.

Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe Ever

If you're ever looking for a soft, delicious, reliable chocolate chip cookie recipe, this is my go-to recipe (thanks, Hyerim!)
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/award-winning-soft-chocolate-chip-cookies/
The secret lies in the pudding!

cookie monster.

German Chocolate Cupcakes

It was my boyfriend's boss's birthday today, so David made a request for some German choc. cupcakes - (Mr. Amundson's fave!). I've vaguely heard of it before, but I never really saw or tasted it, but it was a great time to try!

So, I first baked chocolate cupcakes - first time baking chocolate cake from scratch - and lemme tell ya, the flavor is ALWAYS better when it's from scratch!

I used to LOVE the easy cake mixes, and honestly, that's where my love for baking first began in high school. (that is, after the Easy Bake Oven - but that one was a huge letdown.)
But once I started baking from scratch, the cake mixes taste too eggy to me now.

But anyway, onto the pictures!

Left: Ready to cream the butter + sugar in my KitchenAid;
Right: dry ingredients (cocoa powder, flour, baking soda, salt)

The recipe calls for buttermilk, but the suggested alternative is using milk with some lemon juice!  It creates a chemical reaction that makes the milk ... curdle? and gives it a buttermilky flavor.
(science shout-out --> PRECIPITATION REACTION of the protein casein in milk - acid+base reaction, i'm assuming)
BUT, I did not know this would happen, so I completely FREAKED out when I was pouring the milk mixture into the batter because I thought my milk was spoiled!  But I realized, that was supposed to happen! - who knew!

Delicious final product: YUM.

The chocolate cake recipe from scratch makes the chocolate taste much deeper and richer, so I loved that.


Now it was onto the topping that makes german chocolate what it is:

Heated mixture of evaporated milk, brown sugar, butter, coconut, and pecans

Allow the topping to cool and then glop it on!

German Chocolate Cupcake!

And there we have it!
Happy Birthday Mr. Amundson!
Hope everyone at Minuteman Transport enjoyed them! =)

Boredom

During one of our timed midterms (COMBOT), we have 1 minute to answer each question.  Obviously, some questions take about 5 seconds to answer, so you gotta find ways to entertain  yourself.

This is what I did.

M-I-C-K-E-Y  M-O-U-S-E!  Mickey Mouse (Donald Duck!)

Of course, that took all of 30 seconds, so it didn't kill that much time, but I wonder how long Mickey will go unnoticed by the janitorial staff. heheh.

He's guaranteed to stick around as long as I'm sitting there to re-draw him in if he ever gets erased.  So after 2013, we'll see how long he lasts! Seat P5 in Sim Lab.  hehe. =)

Wax-Ups

Since this blog is sweet TOOTH, I figured it was time for some dental school pictures!

For our Morphology/Occlusion class, we have to "wax-up" different teeth.
Basically, we made a stone model of teeth.  Then we shave a tooth down to nothing and then build it back up using wax and instruments!

We had already done this tooth (#14 - upper left 1st molar) so we had to cut it off and do it again.

Goodbye wax.

Starting again from scratch.

I liked my wax-up, so I preserved it.  Onto the next one.

1. Build up with big blob first

3. Triangular/Cusp Ridges

2. Add cones for the cusps

4. More ridges & Fill-in

5. Clean up and polish!

yay.  I love dentistry.

BlogLovin!

http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/3551689/joans-sweet-tooth?claim=mkjkw9cmchf

Follow me on Blog Lovin!

Football Cookies

Our church (CCH - Community Church at Holliston) had a women's football tournament on Saturday, so I decided to make some football themed goodies for the event.

I had just finished my midterms for the week, and the game was on Saturday morning, so I baked allll Friday night into the wee hours of the morn.. and lemme tell ya, baking when tired doesn't usually work out for me.
I wasn't thinking, and I overmixed my first batch of cookie dough and it became a huge pile of depressing (but sweet) crumbs.

Second batch (the red football helmets below) were not cutting properly, so I had to keep freezing them to be able to cut them, but something must have been wrong with the butter proportions because they spread while baking when they shouldn't have. (Very frustrating).
Third batch (chocolate helmets) turned out okay, but my icing/piping was not clean.

So all in all, they did NOT turn out the way I was hoping =( but you learn the most from mistakes, right?
And I figured, the angry birds were a success, so I was due for some failures - for every high there is a low (for every to there is a fro. hehee)

So anyway, here are the cookies:

Chocolate sablee cookies for the football cookies - very crumbly/crunchy texture,
Royal icing (egg white + powdered sugar) for the football stripes.
My baking book told me to use parchment paper cones when using the royal icing, but I stubbornly didn't follow the rules and used a ziploc bag instead, so the results were not as neat and clean as I would have liked.
Note to self  - next time, follow ALL instructions.

Sugar/Butter Cookie  shaped into helmets,
Red sugar crystals for our team color (use beaten egg whites to "glue" the sugar on)
Same royal icing for the helmet mask (again, could have been much cleaner)


But anyway, I'm so proud of our football team and coaches - they did an AWESOME job at the tournament!
Plus, I have a wonderful CCH/Overflow family and they enjoyed the cookies, so that's really all that matters in the end <3