(this submission to the Accretionary Wedge #30 Bake Sale is late due to a missing camera. Luckily, someone found my camera and now I can show off my baking “mistake”)
My original goal was to bake a metamorphic rock cake that had a bimodal distribution of porphyroblasts. I was going to use green & blue sprinkles to defining the schistose layering (micas) and two different sizes of chocolate chips (the normal & minis) to represent a bimodal garnet distribution. Instead of going the “easy” route, I decided to crack open my copy of Fannie Farmer and make the cake from scratch. This is what came out of the oven:
my non-metamorphic cake
Well, that’s not a schist. So what happened?
I had assumed that the viscosity of the cake batter would prevent the chocolate chips & sprinkles from moving very far within their original location in the pan. However, as the cake went into the oven, the viscosity of the batter went down and the “garnets” started to settle at the bottom of the pan. Which, had I had a way to capture the movement, would have been a great example of crystal settling within a magma chamber:
http://www.tulane.edu/~sanelson/images/xlsettling.gif
The blue & green sprinkles were not as heavy as the chocolate chips, so they simply homogenized within the “magma chamber” and gave the cake its green look. My oven also has issues, so even though the middle of the cake had originally swelled and was a good bit higher than the edges, during cooling the center “caldera” of the cake subsided. A similar process occurs with volcanoes when you remove the magma from the chamber either quickly (a massive eruption like Pinatubo in 1991) or slowly draining it (Mauna Loa from 1983-2001):
http://www.rpdp.net/sciencetips_v3/images/e8c5/image009.jpg
So, ironically enough, I didn’t produce a schist, but I managed to accidentally make a fairly decent mafic volcano similar to what might be found in Iceland 
I’ll have to try again for the schist sometime this spring.
Elli Goeke
Nice!
I’ve experimented with chocolate chips in cake, and every time without fail they formed a cumulate layer at the bottom. I had much more success with just using a knife to flake off bits of a chocolate bar – it improved the weight/surface area ratio enough for them to ‘float’ in the batter during cooking.
I’m thinking of trying a quick bread batter instead of a cake batter. I think the viscosity will be high enough to keep the chocolate chips from going anywhere, but my other option may be scones or a muffin batter. Always up for excuses to bake
I haven’t had much luck with chocolate chips in quick breads. Around 70% of them end up on the bottom. Mini chips might work though.
Still, I bet the cumulate was yummy.
I’ve managed to successfully make banana choc chip bread in the past where I didn’t get a cummulate layer, so there’s hope.
And yes, that cummulate layer was definitely yummy. It was like using a chocolate crust underneath the cake, which normally I only do with cheesecake
[...] suggests baked a cake with the intention to make a “schist” analogue, but it actually works better as an analogy for crystal settling. Check it out: all the chocolate chips sunk to the bottom of the batter “magma chamber” [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Chris Rowan, Callan Bentley. Callan Bentley said: Updated the AW RT @ugrandite: my camera reappeared, so my better-late-than-never baking "mistake" submission to AW 30: http://bit.ly/eYTwMq [...]
Yeast bread doughs would be strong enough to support “garnets”, and if one kneads them in at the last minute before baking one could possibly get some interesting fold textures preserved…
(I didn’t make time to play this month because my camera batteries are flat and I didn’t bring the charger with me)
Whenever I think of yeast breads & chocolate, I’m reminded of the chocolate cherry bread available at the coop in IC. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll try the yeast bread option after I get through the others–I can see it now: a semester of schist attempts