Cake geekery :)

While researching how to make decadent cakes, I've discovered something really quite cool. If you want flavored sugar, we'll use vanilla as an example, take a jar, sugar, a vanilla bean, split the vanilla bean to expose the little seeds, close the jar, and wait a week or so. The flavor of the vanilla will infuse with the sugar and you have vanilla sugar! Brilliant!
Also, I was looking up how to make fondant (what covers wedding cakes and gives it that smooth appearance), being this is apparently quite difficult to make and can be a real pain in the ass. Good old wikipedia was my first resource and I had to laugh when it gave me this:

Fondant is formed by supersaturating sucrose in water. More sugar will dissolve in water with a higher temperature.

Then, after the sucrose is dissolved, the solution is left to cool and the sugar will remain dissolved in the supersaturated solution until nucleation occurs.

• If, while the solution is supersaturated, a seed crystal (undissolved sucrose) falls into the mix, or the solution is agitated the dissolved sucrose will crystallize to form large, crunchy crystals.
• If, however, the solution is allowed to cool and then stirred furiously, violently mixing the entire mixture, it will form many tiny crystals and result in a smooth texture.

You know... just in case you're a geek AND a baker :)