Celebrating NDU Graduation with a Solar Cake!
Submitted by louelin on Thu, 06/14/2012 - 16:17
National Defense University (NDU) is the premier center for Joint Professional Military Education (JPME) and home to STAR-TIDES. On June 7th, NDU held its annual graduation exercises at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington, DC. A total of 692 students graduated and General Martin E. Dempsey, US Army, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the graduation speaker.
Among the many highlights from graduation, was Afzal Syed's solar cooking demo. Afzal, is one of our solar cooking SMEs in the STAR-TIDES network and he has also exhibited at our annual technology demo. This year, Afzal thought it would be fun to bake a cake for his friend, who was graduating from NDU. Fortunately it was a beautiful day (as displayed by the photos) and Afzal set-up his cooker early in the morning and left it out in the field to bake the cake. After graduation commenced, a solar cooked cake was served!
To bake the cake, Afzal used a Cookit, which consists of cardboard and foil, a black pot and a heat resistant bag (to prevent heat from escaping). Cakes can be prepared normally and it usually takes about 1½ -2 hours to cook. One of the best things about the Cookit design is that it's open-source, but it can also be purchased online for about $25. We are lucky to have advocates like Afzal working to promote broader use of solar cooking!
For more about solar cooking visit: http://www.solarcookers.org/index.html
