FAMOUS MOMENTS IN CAKE-RELATED HISTORY
1538-“A man can not have his cake and eate his cake!” the Duke of Norfolk screams in a letter to Thomas Cromwell.
1773-“A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges,” Benjamin Franklin writes ominously three years before the Revolutionary War.
1789– “The people can go eff themselves,” says Marie Antoinette while eating a huge piece of cake.
1864-“Johnnycakes are awful and not really cakes,” several people admit on their deathbeds during the Civil War.
1900– “What am i even fighting for??!!!” A British man cries and slams his fist into a sponge cake during the Boer War.
1945– “I was just following orders!” claims a Nazi army cook when asked why he doubled the amount of butter in a cake.
1995– “You can’t eat your cake and have it too,” writes the anonymous Unabomber leading to the arrest of Ted Kaczynski.
And now 2014, there are shockwaves in the world of cake cutting news. Last week NPR ran a story featuring Alex Bellos resurrecting the cake cutting methods of a deceased British mathematician named Sir Francis Galton.
Galton, you see, was Charles Darwin’s first cousin and “one of the fathers of modern statistics.” So the man knew how to cut a cake.
In 1906 he wrote a letter to Nature magazine explaining why cutting cake into wedges is total shite.
Basically, unless you eat the entire cake in one sitting the edge pieces swiftly dry out due to the loss of the icing sealant where the cake interior has been exposed.
Instead, Galton implored dessert eaters to cut long slices the entire diameter of the cake from the center and then slide the two sides of the cake back together and bind them together (Bellos suggests rubber bands). Then the next day, you quarter the cake, cut your slice from the middle, and ram it back together again. You basically keep doing that till the cake is gone.
It stays moist that way.
So how does it feel to be told you’re cutting your cake all wrong and always have been?
Is science right again?
spartanholiday 