Around The World In 7 Seconds

You wouldn’t think that math would play a particularly large part in what I do on a day to day basis. But consider the globe cake. I needed to prepare the images of the continents in advance, prior to baking the cake. But what size to make them? Luckily, I had in my possession a toy globe, roughly the size of a tennis ball. By figuring out how many times larger than the ball my cake would be, I managed to calculate the size of the continents.

Easy enough.

Here’s where the problems began. The batter filled less of the pans than I expected, but I figured it would rise enough in the oven to compensate. It didn’t. The cake was too small to accommodate everything that needed to go on top of it. So I decided to make an additional filler cake to put in between the two halves of the globe. Genius, right? Well, no. It made the cake taller but obviously didn’t increase the diameter. More importantly, it had lost its globe cake ball shape.

So at 10 pm I started again from scratch, pouring much more batter into each pan to achieve the stunning effect you see here.

Turned out the math was pretty accurate. Everything fit on just fine.

Just don’t go looking for Greenland.