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I learn so much from my intergenerational friends. Looking forward, my quinquagenarian companion reminds me that life is too long to get lost and stressed in everyday minutia. After a long career with Chicago Public Schools, his eyes are squarely set on retirement to a bucolic Canadian hamlet. He has transcended petty workplace dramas and is confident enough in his familial ties to know that family troubles too shall pass. In the other direction, this month marks the birthday of and my one-year friendiversary with the two-year-old-soon-to-be-three-year-old next door: Mr. George. He is precocious, curious, kind, raised by a rad dad and awesome mom, and keeps alive my childlike spirit of wonder that I so prize. He also loves dinosaurs, which forms the bedrock of our friendship if I’m being truly honest. So for his birthday this year, I’m donning my apron and baking the kiddo a Mesozoic masterpiece worthy of his imagination and acuity. Most so-called “Dino Dig” cakes you’ll see are *sniff* *adjusts spectacles* specious. Entire skeletons lounge atop a single layer of soil, insinuating that one merely trips over a T. rex and eliding MILLIONS OF YEARS of geological history. What are we teaching our children?! Will constructing an educational excavational entremets be easy? No. But our children deserve better. I cannot in good conscience let Mr. George be hoodwinked by the lies that an inferior cake would lead him to believe. I must bake him a geologically accurate “Dino Dig” cake. My first task is to tackle the strata, the different levels of temporally contiguous sediment that geologists use to learn about the earth in different eras. Mr. George will dig through layer after layer of confectionary rock (the fourth kind, along with igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic) to reach the bones buried in the lower half of the cake. I used the Hell Creek Formation (HCF), a famous fossil bed in Montana, as the model my cake. As outlined in the diagram below (source), there are six distinct strata of three types of sediment atop the HCF. While the most faithful representation would stack six distinct forms of cake or cookie, I must strike the perfect balance between verisimilitude and interactivity. In fact, logistics will be the trickiest nugget of this bake. Would Mr. George have the ability and patience to dig through so many layers of sandy shortbread, crunchy crumble, and pebble-icious pastry, each a unique texture and toughness? How much effort would that take to make? That’s not even considering the cake’s base, which must meet several conditions:
Between the two will be the star of my cake: the K-Pg Boundary. This wafer-thin stratum, dated to 65 million years ago, separates the Mesozoic Era (the age of the dinosaurs) from the Cenozoic Era (in which we currently live) and provides crucial support for the theory that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. It contains an extraordinary concentration of iridium, an element found largely in stellar objects, which could only have been introduced to the Earth by an asteroid and distributed across the earth by its impact. When this evidence is combined with a massive crater of the same age in Mexico, a clear picture emerges. All these facts, all these factors – it seemed impossible to harmonize them all and find a single birthday dessert that satisfies all the conditions constraining my vision. After countless hours of frustrated and failed engineering, I finally saw the solution. It was so clear, so obvious – I had to think outside the oven! All my structural concerns will be solved with a simple shift from cake to trifle. It’s the perfect form! A trifle not only enables clear layering in a variety of textures and flavors, it will readily conceal the hidden dinosaur bones. My final vision stands as such: After rooting through layers of silt (granola), sand (vanilla pudding mixed with graham cracker crumbs), and pebble (broken Oreo cookies), Mr. George reaches the K-Pg Boundary – a thin, hard layer of white chocolate ganache with glittery sprinkles. Below lies his true prize – dinosaur bones buried in a cookies-and-cream cheesecake, which have tempted him through the trifle’s glass walls from the very beginning of the dig. I will, of course, include a binder of research on the Cretaceous-Paelogene extinction event, currently prevailing theories, and how the trifle reflects the geological record. Or maybe just an explanatory index card. We’ll see how I’m feeling on the day. That’s the plan at this point. Of course, no plan survives first contact with the kitchen, but this concept lands at the intersection of Delicious, Enlightening, and Fun. If I can pull this off, and I think I can, I’ll have a happy neighbor and a better friend on the other side. Hopefully he’ll find as much value in it as I do!
1 Comment
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