I previously worked at Intel Corp. I was hired into their Rotation Engineer Program (REP), which was superbly managed at the time by Joseph Rascon. He recruited some of the most talented, creative, and diverse engineers and scientists that I have ever had the privilege of working with. One of the fun traditions of the program was for the incoming class to try to one-up the previous year of new-hires at a celebration. Our group (shout outs to REP Class of 2012) presented a “special dessert,” which was the brainchild of my classmate, Ellann Cohen. Ellann and I used the Makey Makey Kit  to prototype and “build” an interactive piano cake that could actually play music. A good cake has to be soft and moist, which posed a problem for us in terms of being able to complete the kit’s circuits (i.e., to play notes), so we ended up using graham crackers to raise the piano keys and to isolate them from the rest of the cake (brilliant!). The final challenge that we had to overcome was that our cake design mysteriously stopped working after some hours had passed. We realized that the graham crackers eventually absorbed the moisture of the cake. Now I may not be an electrical engineer, but moisture + circuits = bad. As is often the case with innovation, we sometimes have to work within a small window of time based on a go-to-supermarket strategy :). What we learned: Prototyping, iterative design, testing, testing, and more testing. The cake turned out wonderfully so check out the video below. Listen closely and you will hear the Intel Jingle at the end. And yes, we did bring ourselves to finally eating the cake… eventually. Music to my mouth! OK, I’m done with the cheesy one-liners now.