How do different ingredients become a cake?

Moment of Um

American Public Media

Kids & Family, Education For Kids

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2023

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There are tons of cake recipes out there, from angel food to red velvet. These recipes make different types of cake, but mostly share the same ingredients, like flour, sugar and eggs. When you mix them up and pop them in the oven, it seems like magic happens! How does that pile of ingredients turn into a cake? We asked science writer Stuart Farrimond to help us find the answer.

Got a question that takes the cake? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll help find an answer – no ifs, ands, or bundts.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um. Moment of Um, um, comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Anna G.
0:18.4	I love cooking. I do it just about every day, whether it's scrambled eggs for
0:26.0	breakfast, a tasty plate of pasta for dinner, or some wild kitchen experiment that
0:31.0	involves two trips to the grocery store and almost all of my
0:34.2	pods and pans.
0:36.2	I think one of the coolest things about cooking, besides getting to make and eat delicious
0:40.8	things, is how combinations of ingredients are transformed by heat from the
0:45.6	stove or oven into something better. Like my favorite pasta sauce recipe. It's just a big can of crushed tomatoes, an onion cut up into quarters, and half a stick of butter.
0:57.2	You put all that into a pot on the stove, bring it to a gentle simmer, and let it bubble away for an hour or so.
1:04.7	In that time, the onions soften until they're all melty,
1:08.3	the tomato and the butter fuse into something rich and silky,
1:12.1	and the whole house smells amazing. It's
1:16.2	magical. I could talk about stewing and braising and sautying all day but baking is a different story. If cooking is magical, dessert baking is pure wizardry.
1:29.2	Like what even happens in that oven? How does a pan full of gloppy wet batter go in there and come out a glorious fluffy confection?
1:40.1	My friend Esmei was curious about this too.
1:43.0	How do the ingredients of a cake become a cake?
1:47.0	Basically what happens is that all those different ingredients
1:51.0	they change as you mix them and as you put them in the
1:53.8	oven into this thing that we call a cake. My name is Dr. Stue Farrimond. I'm from the
1:58.8	UK and I am a science writer. I'm a former medical doctor and I write lots of books about the science of the world around us.
2:07.0	Each of the different ingredients that you have in a cake they have a role in what the cake ends up being like. So the amazing thing is is that when you put some
2:15.2	liquid in with the flour, be it the milk, be it the water and the liquid in the eggs maybe, then this incredible thing happens. So when you're mixing with your hands you know it's kind of
	...

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