What’s the Best Way to Slice a Cake?
It turns out that there are lots of very interesting approaches to answering that question.
Note: This post includes several short video clips that are essential to the story, so I strongly recommend that you read the web version, not the emailed version. Enjoy! — Paul
Earlier this week I wrote about various aspects of slicing a pie. That leads to an obvious follow-up question: What’s the best way to slice a cake?
For sheet cakes and other rectangular cakes, the answer is obvious: You use straight, perpendicular cuts to slice the cake into smaller rectangles. The answer is similarly straightforward for Bundt cakes and other ring cakes: You slice them around the ring.
Until recently, I thought the answer for conventional round cakes was obvious as well: You cut them into triangular wedges, as seen in the 1927 magazine ad shown above. It worked fine back then, and it still works today.
But thanks to a recent New York Times article, I’ve learned that there’s a burgeoning community of bakers on social media who’ve been showcasing new ways of slicing a circular cake. Here’s one example, which involves lots of diagonal cuts that result in some very pleasing geometry: