What is that? A dinosaur? An abnormal growth? If I eat it, will I die? Will it die? If approached with a knife, will it defend itself? Does this thing know what it is? Is it sentient? If it were stranded on a desert island, what three books would it bring, and why?
These are all questions that are undoubtedly going through your head right now. Without a doubt. It’s an odd-looking cake, for sure. This is actually a birthday cake for Jack, and it’s a fractal cake. For those of you that don’t know what a fractal is, it’s a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole (Wikipedia, obviously). In other words, it’s science. It’s perfect for Jack, the math major, because it’s just like him – Mathy on the outside, and inside he’s made of cake.
After Jack showed me about fifty different examples of fractals, because I just could not get this concept down, I got to work. As you can see, there are little piped cones coming off of larger fondant cones, which all extend from the largest cone, the cake. Theoretically this cake would be just one among many sprouting from an even larger cone, which in turn would have its own mother cone, and grandmother cone and sister cones and whatever. For reasons I can’t remember, the cake was red velvet on the bottom, and vanilla on the top.
I cut it down into a cone shape, smothered it in ganoosh, and wrapped it in white fondant.
I really tried to avoid using a ridiculous amount of fondant for this thing. But I just couldn’t come up with a better idea than solid cones of (expensive) fondant. This thing was completed over the course of a few days, and the general consensus was that it is a dinosaur.
I liked how it looked before the piping, personally. It really does look like a dinosaur. A tiny dinosaur who’s defense mechanism is just like Kirby’s. Turn into a stone. Unfortunately, in order to make it a convincing fractal, I needed more cones. So I piped them on real quick then we ate it.
Considering that Jack’s actual birthday was pummeled by a disease we’ve dubbed “Harlem Fever” – leaving 63% of all brunch attendees the week prior incapacitated – this made for a decent recovery. Heidi and Mark came by and we did our usual big meal/biggest loser thing. After which we demolished the dinosaur, just like that meteor did.
Oh and we call it Harlem fever because friend James came to that fateful brunch, he lives in Harlem, and someone needed to be blamed.
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