Happy Pi Day (and a Cake)!

Happy Pi Day!

In honor of the occasion, I decided to bake a cake. (I'm not a pie baker so it's gonna be a cake.) It has to be π-themed, of course. So I decided to make a cake that represents a method of calculating π.

Imagine a square with a circle inside it:


Let's take the ratio of the area of the circle and the square. If the radius of the circle is R, then the area of the circle is πR². The length of the side of the square is 2R, so the area of the square is (2R)² = 4 R². So the ratio is

πR²/(4 R²) = πR²/(4 R²) = π/4.

I chose my old standard, the cocoa devil's food cake from The Joy of Cooking; here are the ingredients:



And here are the pans in which I will bake the layers:

You can see they are nearly the same size:

I'll spare you the details of making the cake except to mention that since I'm using buttermilk powder I added the powder in with the dry ingredients, and put plain water in the wet ingredients:


Here are the finished layers:
Unfortunately the round layer is too large
so I have to trim it a bit:
Here I start frosting the square layer
and here it is after frosting
Then I added the round layer
and sealed in the crumbs where I trimmed it, with a thin layer of frosting,
before frosting over with a thicker coat
This is what it looks like with the frosting, before I decorate it further:
At the recommendation of avid reader and real-life friend Rico, I decorated the cake with sprinkles;* here's an overhead view
and a view from a more photogenic angle:
I made some frosting sandwiches with the leftover frosting and circumference
which was enjoyed by my two boys.


* You'll see why in a later post!