Cake by Numbers
Thursday, 4 September 2014
When Jett chose to have a birthday cake that was the same as the cakes presented in the popular game Minecraft I thought I had the easiest assignment in the world..especially as there were also some good example cakes to check out too..  
I mean just look at it! - The computer cake on the left is created out of chunky looking square pixels which would translate in an orderly fashion to square icing 'tiles' (see actual cake on right). Easy. Colour by numbers I tell you. Well it would be, but when I returned (slightly fatigued) from my walks yesterday I quickly put the undercoat layer of icing on the cake so I could go ahead and finish it off with the outside tiles today. Only I didn't stop to think, I just did it. Thus, this morning my cake looked like this: 
Which is absolutely totally fine, except that a minecraft cake has a 14:8 width to height ratio. And mine was well..um 22cm x 10cm. uh oh! Compounding this was the fact that I only had one square cutter, and it was 2x2cm. Of course I could have cut the tiles to any size with a knife, but aside from all the extra measuring I would have had to do, icing can stretch while you cut it - so the tiles wouldn't have been uniform and no amount of resizing would fix the underlying ratio problem anyway. So I needed to do calculations to work out what I could do with what I had, in order to re-create the essence (if not the entirety), of a minecraft cake.. 
Sheesh - and this was supposed to be easy! When I finally came up with a solution (11 squares x 5 squares with a pattern adjustment) I still had to colour 2 different browns, two different greys, and then cut all the tiles… gawd.. 
About an hour into the cutting, I realised that I'd have just about finished any other cake by now.. such as the pirate cake I did for Jett a few years ago.. 
So it turns out straight lines and rigid patterns are not helpful at all, they are a pain! Anyway - on I laboured, and after almost 2 hours I had completed the top of the cake..  
Then I had to rush off to school to take Jett's extension maths class. Before I left I just had time to put together and print out a 'special' problem for them which went something like this (I've shortened it and removed the pics for your convenience).. q) I would like to make a minecraft cake that looks like this: [example pic] and I have a cutter that can make 2x2cm square icing tiles [example pic]. What size cake do I need to make ? clever huh! It took them a while to work out how to solve the problem (i.e. count squares, times by two) - it's actually quite interesting what they are good at and not good at as a group but that's another story for another time. Anyway - back at home I worked on the sides of the cake (another hour or so) - there are 55 tiles on each side. 
and then, because I'm a sucker for punishment I decided the cake board should be pixelated too, so the finished product looked like this - I ran out of green so I decided the visible edge of the board was a feature, not a bug.  So it turned out ok in the end. You can see bigger than desirable gaps between the tiles on the cake but I really couldn't do anything about it due to the required coverage. I'm happy that the modified pattern still works - the kids haven't noticed that it's not exactly the real pattern (due once again to the incorrect ratio that I started with). But it certainly took twice as long as a regular equivalent sized cake. And given that my expectations where that it would take half as long as a regular cake, the reality was therefore four times longer! Actually that would make a good extension maths question.. q) Cathy sets out to make a straight forward cake in an hour. At the start she makes a mistake that results in the whole operation taking twice as long as it should have. Will she finish it in time to take Zali to her horse riding lesson which is a fifteen minute drive away and when will she get time to do the shopping for Jett's party tomorrow?..
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