Möbius Cake #MerryChristMaths
The “roscón de Reyes” is a sweet toroidal-shaped cake decorated with frosted fruit (a type of fruit that nobody likes it and everyone throws it away). This caki is traditionally filled with cream or whipped cream, although it can also be filled with chocolate, mocha, truffle, strawberry… whatever comes to mind, anything but frosted fruit. This cake is served on the 6th of January.
Yes, only once per year.
Today, we are going to prepare a Möbius Cake, a new dessert that is almost exactly the same as the Roscón de Reyes, but with a new shape that will allow you to surprise all your mathematical friends (and curious people in general).
What’s the difference with the Möbius Cake and the mainstream Roscón de Reyes? Well, only one: the placement of its filling.
When cooking the roscón, the dough is given a toroidal shape (doughnut shape). Then we cut the roscón and filled it with your favourite cream, then decorated with frosted fruit, and then we removed the frosted fruit before eating (remember that nobody likes it). But how do you cut it before filled it? In this way:
It is cut through it with the knife so that the toroid is divided into two “half toroids” in a longitudinal way. This way of cutting it is too basic, sure that the mathematics allow to cut it of a better way.
Indeed, there is a way of cutting that allows us to divide the dough of the donut into two halves so that they stay together. In addition, one of the two halves is a Möbius band.
With this second video we can see a little better the shape of the cut, which is nothing more than cutting the roscón longitudinally while turning the knife.
Done! Now we have a mathematically Christmas sweet with which we can surprise our friends and make them forget to remove the frosted fruit.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
