Of Molecular Turtles and Other Oddities

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

The Great Cadbury Cream Cake Experiment

While foraging around my not so local gelato dealer I discovered that the flavour Cadbury Cream Egg exists and not only does it exist it appears to be popular! With this in mind I started thinking what would happen if I combined the chocolaty goodness of cake with the creamy sweetness of cream eggs. Thus begins the great cream cake experiment.

Hypothesis
When one replaces the eggs in a normal cake mix with cream eggs the end result is a terrible chimera resembling neither cake nor cream egg.
Methods
I made two cakes, one being the control cake the other being one that replaces eggs with cream eggs. The purpose of the control cake was to see if there was any noticeable change to the taste or other qualitative or quantitative attributes between cakes. Since the only variable that had changed was the substitution of eggs the changes could be attributed to the cream eggs.
Step 1 Assemble Ingredients

Step 2 Crack the Eggs
As you may have guessed traditional methods of egg cracking were unsuccessful but as they say desperation is the father of innovation.
Step 3 add the eggs
The viscosity of the cream egg yoke caused some problems as the picture on the left was taken after several minutes of apparent yoke stasis. However I made an important discovery of my own. If this whole Biotechnology business doesn't pan out I can market cream egg yoke as an industrial adhesive or super glue. The best part is if you glue your hands together you just have to lick them and you're free and it also serves as a meal on the go. ( Note: you have to toss the shells after all no one adds shells to thier cakes)

Step 4 Add the Milk, Oil and Cake Mix
Add the other ingredients and beat the living day lights out of them and pour into a pan.
Step 5 Bake Both the Control and Cream Cake
Both cakes were baked in the same oven at the same time. The cake on the left is the cream cake the cake on the right is the control.
Results
My initial expected result was this was going to be a tremendous waste of time, money and cream eggs. I thought the cake either would be just a formless mass or taste terrible or both but boy was I surprised. In the second part of the experiment I let friends and family try both cakes and choose which one they preferred. Keep in mind they had no idea that I used cream eggs instead of normal eggs in one of the cakes. Shockingly everyone prefers the cream cake, in fact at the moment I have about 3 slices of it left and 3/4 of the other one. I really have to find a way to market this.