27 January, 2011

Accretionary Wedge #30: Bake Sale Madness

Only for you lot would I whip out my long-neglected electric mixer and put my poor, long-suffering intrepid companion through an afternoon of baking, grumbling, decorating, more grumbling...  Damn it, Jim, I'm a writer, not a baker!

What I would've liked to end up with was a model of the Cascades in miniature.  What we've got is a generic sort of cirque glacier thingy.


Looking back on it, we should've done it with two cakes: a nice round stacked on top would've given me a better shot at mountains.  So it goes.  Use your imaginations.

Anyway.  We've got some features of a glacier going on.  I even annotated the photo for ye!


As you can see, we've got a wee little cirque glacier spilling down a (work with me, people!) mountainside.  It's in retreat!  You can tell because it's left behind a nice terminal moraine, which its outwash stream has breached.  This, along with the fact I didn't buy a lot of blue icing, explains why there's no lake piled up behind the moraine.

The stream itself is the typical braided type you so often see draining meltwater from glaciers.  I would've tried to mimic the milky appearance of rock flour in the water, but decided it wasn't worth the risk.  Besides, we wanted cake!

It was nearly impossible to photograph, so I haven't got a good example, but the bottom part of the glacier's created a nice, U-shaped valley, even.  And I'm sure you've noticed all the little brown flecks in the glacier.  Ice is covered in rockfall, y'see.  It's very dirty ice.  And very tasty, too!

Right, then.  That's it.  Mixer's being retired again.  And the next time we hold a bake sale, I'm going with my original idea - breccia.  Or possibly a nice tillite.

3 comments:

Silver Fox said...

I like it, especially the stream breaching the coarse terminal moraine! I thought about doing a breccia also, can you imagine all that nice icing cement between all the pieces? :)

Cujo359 said...

Looking back on it, we should've done it with two cakes: a nice round stacked on top would've given me a better shot at mountains.

While it was an excellent choice from a culinary perspective, making the thing chocolate probably made it a lot more difficult to see the relief in the cake. Dark colors make shadows more difficult to see.

The things I think of days after the fact ...

Silver Fox said...

Cujo359: A spice cake would have solved the dark v light problem: neither too dark or too light. And, the only cake that qualifies for my picky cakey tastes.

Listen, I can't criticize anyone else's baking. Seriously. I mostly just don't do it. Let them eat ice cream!