From the brains behind brains on, this is the Moment of Um.

Um.

Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Anna G. I love cooking. I do it just about every day, whether it's scrambled eggs for breakfast,

a tasty plate of pasta for dinner, or some wild kitchen experiment that involves two trips

to the grocery store and almost all of my pods and pans.

I think one of the coolest things about cooking, besides

getting to make and eat delicious things, is how combinations of ingredients are transformed by heat

from the 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. 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. In that time, the onions soften until they're all melty, the tomato and the

butter fuse into something rich and silky,

and the whole house smells amazing.

It's magical.

I could talk about stewing and brazing and sauteing all day, but baking is a different story.

If cooking is magical, dessert baking is pure wizardry. 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?

My friend Esme was curious about this, too. How do the ingredients of a cake become a cake?

Basically what happens is that all those different ingredients, they change as you mix them and as you put them in the oven into this thing that we call a cake.

My name is Dr. Stu Farrimand. I'm from the 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. Each of the different

ingredients that you have and a cake, they have a role in what the cake ends up being like. So the

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