(bright music) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] Bringing journalism to life on stage, amplifying local culture, deepening civic participation.

(upbeat music) - I wanted to welcome you all into our very amazing event tonight.

Science is a Piece of Cake.

This time we're doing something very different.

How many of you were here for our first event?

Okay.

Welcome back.

Welcome back.

I'm glad that it was good enough for you to return, so we appreciate that.

Of the people who were here the last time, did any of you enter, were you entered?

Raise your hand if you entered in.

Okay.

All right.

Welcome back bakers.

Our first event, we did geology, which was really exciting.

And we had you recreate different places throughout the Bay Area, but tonight we're focusing in on astronomy and we're gonna get very specific with it.

So it's really exciting.

Tonight we're gonna be melding cake and science, and we're gonna learn how the elements go into the cakes that we're gonna see on stage.

And also we're gonna learn so much more about astronomy outside of our earth's atmosphere, how the stars collide and combine to create these elements that make us who we are today.

So without further ado, I'd love to have me join on stage, my co-host for tonight, Adhiti Bandlamudi.

(crowd cheering and applauding) Hello Adhiti.

- Hey Cecilia.

- So Adhiti in your daytime, you are KQED's housing reporter.

But in your free time and spare time, you are a cake aficionado.

- I'm a cake eater and a cake maker.

- All right, so it's great to have you on the stage because a lot of this is actually your inspiration and your idea for what we could do to explain space through cake.

So can you tell everybody a little bit about how you came up with the idea behind this?

- Yeah so after we did the first event, I was sort of like, okay, geology and cake, now astronomy and cake.

How do we do that?

And I decided to go to Cal Academy's Planetarium as one does.

- How many have been?

How many have been?

Oh, that's a lot.

- Amazing.

Very good.

Those of you who didn't raise your hand, please go.

It's amazing.

And in the planetarium you can actually see this movie called Spark the Universe In Us.

And it's really, really cool.

And it basically is about, I guess the life cycle of a star.

And more importantly, it's about the elements that are created from all these different interactions.

So we tried to translate all of that into cake.

- Exactly.

And it was no easy feat, but we didn't have to bake this time right?

- We did not have to bake, thank God, no.

- Exactly.

So today we're gonna learn about the birth life, the death, and the rebirth of these stars through the elements.

And along with that we had to have another baker join you.

So you've invited another person to come on stage.

- I really did.

Yes, it is Jamie Li and Jamie will join us out here.

Now Jamie requires a huge round of applause.

She runs Jamie Cakes SF.

She was featured in HBO's, sorry, Baketopia.

Right.

Amazing show.

And she also was one of our judges for the previous geology cake off.

Jamie, how are you feeling tonight?

- I just came back for the cake really.

So I'm really excited about that.

I'm excited to eat some of these out of this world cakes.

I even wore my sparkly shoes, so I'm ready to go, I'm ready.

- I'm wearing a space suit.

This is what I call a space suit.

Thank you.

Thank you.

One of the things that I was excited about for tonight is that you two did a lot of brainstorming as far as like what kinds of cakes we would also have on stage.

Can you tell us a little bit, Jamie, about the types of shapes you were looking for?

What was part of the brainstorming process?

- Yeah, so we were looking for things that were spherical, some half spherical.

We're looking at buttercream how smooth they can get with like some stars are actually quite smooth, like the dwarf stars.

We're also looking for creativity in cakes, a lot of color, how they layered, how they added the elements that these stars produce into the cake as well.

So we're looking at everything from the outside in, so we're really excited about this.

- Okay, great.

So that's the cake portion, but without scientists it's really not a piece of cake and it's not gonna be science without them.

So let's bring to the stage Bruce McIntosh and Jacque Benitez.

(crowd applauding) All right, so Jacque is the assistant manager of the planetary programs at Cal Academy.

And Bruce McIntosh, you're the director and University of California Observatories.

You're also a professor of astrophysics and of astronomy.

Jacque, can you tell us a little bit more about Cal Academy and then Spark the program that you all feature there?

- Sure, so I am very excited to be working at the Morrison Planetarium.

I've been there for about 11 and a half years.

Can't believe how long it's been, but so in the planetarium it's a wonderful place that we get to see different phenomena, different ideas that we normally can't see in our daily lives.

A lot of the things that we're gonna be seeing today happen in a split second or over centuries and it's only with the power of the planetarium that we can see that all in 30 minutes.

So I'm really excited you all get a chance to see a little clips from the show itself.

- Awesome.

And Bruce, can you tell us a little bit about the work that you do and why it's so exciting to be able to have a cake competition to show off that sort of science portion of your studies?

- So I run University of California Observatories, which runs telescopes for the students and the faculty and astronomers throughout the University of California system.

We run Lick Observatory near San Jose.

You are all welcome to come up and visit.

We have summer shows that are pretty amazing.

We run the two Keck telescopes in Hawaii, the ones you see here that have made discoveries, that have won Nobel prizes, found black holes, planets orbiting around other stars.

- Nothing too special.

- And it's pretty awesome to come here and talk about this.

One of the things we understand about the universe, we know how it began.

There was a big bang, big bang made hydrogen and helium the second and third most boring things you can have in the entire universe.

You cannot make a cake out of hydrogen and helium no matter how hard you try.

You also can't make planets and you can't make people, everything else in the universe, every atom in our bodies other than the hydrogen ones was made inside of stars and often stars doing really interesting weird things like exploding, which is kind of what we'll be talking about as we go through all of this here.

So the basic theme is non boring atoms and explosions and how that leads to, to the universe that we get to be part of.

- Hopefully all explosions, just all about space but not within the cakes.

Right?

Nothing like that tonight.

- No exploding cakes.

- Hopefully.

Hopefully.

Unless maybe there were some surprises.

- Maybe there's some surprises.

- Okay.

So we're gonna go through each of the rounds here.

We're gonna start obviously with the beginner round and throughout, we're gonna be taking a look at the different things that the judges are going to be judging the cakes on.

To start with the beginner round, we have a very interesting thing that occurs in space, which is a white dwarf star.

But before we do that, we may as well go ahead and have the big reveal of the cakes.

Normally I would say drum roll, but I think for this more appropriately we'd be like blast off or something.

Should we do that?

Okay, so blast off.

(crowd cheering and applauding) Okay.

So these are very fun.

Okay, so this is the beginner round, so we'll get into the rules for the competition here.

But before we do that, I would love to chat with you Bruce and just learn a little bit more about white dwarf stars.

We do have an image, a still image that we can kind of show to everybody.

And can you explain a little bit more about white dwarf stars?

- White dwarf star is what our sun is gonna end up as.

It's what a kind of medium small star finishes its life as right now the sun is burning, it's turning hydrogen into helium, not very cake friendly.

At the end of its life it's gonna turn helium into slightly more complicated elements.

Carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.

You can technically make a cake out of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.

It's basically just a giant lump of sugar.

Not as interesting as any of these, but we're reaching the point where you can start to have more complicated things.

Once it's done that it can't burn any more fuel and it contracts, we can go to the next picture.

It shrinks down into something basically the size of the earth.

You have something that weighs the mass of an entire sun compressed into a space the size of the earth.

It's so dense that a teaspoonful of it weighs about as much as an elephant, a couple of tons worth.

And then mostly if it's a star by itself, it just sort of sits there and cools off.

But in some cases, white dwarfs are part of pairs of stars.

- And that's where actually we get to see a clip from the planetarium show Spark the Universe In Us.

So we're gonna start off looking at that pair of white dwarfs and they are orbiting each other because they are so massive.

Eventually one of them will lose that push and pull and tug up each other and we'll start to kind of gobble up all of the stuff from that other white dwarf.

And as they continue to go around and around, they are eventually going to collide.

- Always a few seconds later than you want them.

- Yeah, always.

- In these contexts.

- There we go.

And as you can see, it definitely is about the size of planet Earth and it'll start to accumulate all that matter onto itself and then eventually it will collide, hopefully about right now.

No of course not.

But one really cool thing I love about this clip is that it, you can see that this supernova, when it actually does explode, it's not completely spherical.

You can actually see kind of that crest or kind of area where the old super or that other white dwarf was.

So you can kind of tell when you're looking at supernovas, if there is kind of that divot shape in the supernova, most likely it was because it has a companion.

- Exactly.

- And that collision turns a lot of the mass of the star into heavier stuff, especially iron.

It builds its way up element after element until and in the process conveniently blows up and throws all those elements out where the next set of stars can turn them into planets or people.

- Okay.

So as you all are tasting through the cakes and you're starting to judge these three here, Jamie and Adhiti, I know that you two are gonna be mostly focused in on the taste and the creativity portion of this.

- So let's talk a little bit about the creativity and originality portion.

So you have some really specific things that you're looking for in these cakes, Adhiti?

- Yes so as Bruce mentioned, Bruce and Jacque mentioned, you know, white dwarf stars have this sort of like blue iridescent quality to them and we're really looking for cakes that show that quality.

And we've also got this like fun flavor component, you know, because Spark is about really the elements that are created when you know these stars interact with each other.

We wanted to base these flavors or we wanted to have the bakers, you know, get their flavors inspired by the elements that are created when white dwarfs explode.

Jamie take it away.

- So some of these elements that we can find in normal everyday baking is gonna be dairy.

So we're of course a lot of the cakes do have dairy.

We're looking at dairy, we're looking at maybe even breakfast cereals for the iron, calcium, zinc.

So we're looking at sesame seeds, creative uses of sesame seeds, nuts, poppy seeds, pumpkin seeds inside the cakes as well.

And then of course from a baking perspective, we're looking at something with a really nice crumb.

How is it frosted?

Is it accurate?

Does it look smooth?

And creative uses really of any kind of decorating elements.

Did you use sugar?

Did you airbrush?

Yeah, so we're looking at beautiful clean type of cakes that really incorporates all of those flavors elements.

- And maybe unlike another cake contest where a dense cake might not win here, dense stars are dense.

So you know, dense cake might not be that bad.

- Okay, awesome.

Great to know.

Alright, so I think that the judges need to take a moment to deliberate now, so they're gonna do that.

In the meantime, I would love to have the three folks who baked these cakes come to the stage.

(audience cheering and applauding) And if you wouldn't mind just coming right up to the side here.

Thank you so much.

And then just please enter through this side to the stage.

And then go ahead and stand right in front of your cake.

Okay.

Welcome to the stage bakers.

So get nice and close to the table here so we can have all of you nice and tight.

Okay, amazing.

So I will have you introduce yourselves and then tell me what elements went into your cake and if you could just describe how you made it and what ingredients you used and what your inspiration was.

So I'll start with you over here.

Your cake number three.

So tell us about the cake and then it's the two of you two.

Okay so I like that the two white dwarves here.

Yeah.

Okay.

Hopefully one of you will not explode.

And then, okay.

Anyway, keep going.

So what went into your cake?

- So we tried to use as many of the elements as possible.

So we included calcium, magnesium, iron and zinc.

And I'll let Mambi go ahead and describe the exact ingredients.

- Yeah, so well some of it is not actually, it's a bit cheeky.

We did add some Earl gray tea just 'cause you know, white dwarf stars.

It's when the nuclear energy is being exhausted and we are like, you could use some caffeine, you know, we also did sesame and the buttercream as well as in these little brittle that's also in the cake to represent the elements.

These little orbs are made of marza pan, which also contains, you know, some of the elements.

But they represent the planets that might've been orbiting that star before it died.

And if they're farther off from the star, they can continue orbiting it potentially.

But if they are closer, they might explode into shards.

- Hence the sesame shards.

Yep.

- Wow.

I love it.

Very, very, very good.

Very good.

Okay, so we have cake number four, what's your name and then tell me all about your cake and how you made it.

- Okay, I'm Kiki.

- I made a cinnamon toast crunch cake because breakfast cereals are high in iron, maybe not cinnamon toast crunch, but most breakfast cereals are.

And then I asked in the cake balls, I made them really dense because she was saying like white dwarf stars are really dense and so they also have some beet powder in them.

That's why they have a little red tint to them because beet is high in zinc.

And then I used cereal milk, so I took the cereal and I put it in the milk for a while and then I strained it and used that as the dairy product for calcium.

- And then it looks like you have some little tags here.

- Oh yes.

And well, Google told me that there are eight white dwarf stars in the nearest hundred solar systems around our sun.

So I put their names on the stars.

- Amazing.

And don't worry, nobody expected you to be a scientist, so it's okay that you use Google, but great job of using the internet.

We love it.

Okay.

Okay, so what's your name and tell me all about your cake.

- My name's Judy and this is an almond sour cream cake with buttercream frosting.

- Okay, so here's what I'm gonna do now that we have this here.

Oh, I am actually going to turn your cake around so we can see the insides.

If you wouldn't mind, we love this part here.

We've tested this out before.

The audience loves the inside.

All right, there we go.

Okay, so there's the inside of your cakes and then, so tell me how you got the frosting to look that way?

- Actually I tried to make a mirror glaze and it didn't work so I scraped it all off and then kind of splattered it so that it looked like that.

- That's great ingenuity.

I mean that's kind of like space, you know, just splattering everywhere.

This is great.

Okay.

Amazing.

And it looks as though maybe our judges might have a winner perhaps.

Okay, so let's hear about it.

So what did we love about the cakes?

- So, you know, the first cake on the side, cake 14, we felt that the decoration was so smooth and pretty, it's just gorgeous.

It's just such a gorgeous cake.

The fourth one we loved, or sorry, the the middle one, cake number four.

We love the accuracy of it and in fact the little like balls on top were pretty dense, which is accurate.

And finally cake three or this cake right here tasted phenomenal.

I mean just such a great flavor.

But ultimately we decided that cake number four was our winner.

(audience cheering) - Amazing job.

Amazing job.

Very stiff competition.

- They're gonna take it from you.

So come right over a little bit over here.

- Oh my gosh, I entered the cake competition last year in the intermediate category.

That was way too hard for me so I came back with a vengeance.

- You did.

Congratulations.

- Thank you.

- This is amazing.

So we are gonna have a prize for you as well at the end.

And we'll tell you more about that later.

But go ahead and grab your cake, give a hand for the beginner round.

(audience applauding) All right, so we have to move to our next round here and we are going to be heading into the intermediate round.

And for this one, this one is really fun and unique and we are starting out with neutron stars.

Now this one was really specific in the way that we had wanted folks to create the shape of the cake.

So Adhiti and Jamie, can you talk more about like the shapes, what we're looking for like physically.

Once again, I guess we should blast off.

Let's take these off so we can see you.

- Woo, you're good.

- So design wise, what we're really looking for in these cakes is something that is dome shapes.

So we're looking at domes, half spheres, other things that we're looking at is something that is nice and smooth incorporation of some of the elements like gold.

So that was really important here.

So seeing gold, edible gold.

And also, you know, Bruce was talking about how these neutron stars are quite dense.

We definitely, what is it like a teaspoon of something could equal something else and we certainly wouldn't want that like a teaspoon of sea kelp in one bite.

But those are the elements that we're looking for in here is the sea kelp, the gold leaf, any kind of silver sprinkles, silver leaf in the cakes as well.

- Okay, so as the judges are tasting through Bruce, let's chat through the image of the prompt.

So this is what we gave the bakers to take a look at.

And so these neutron stars, they also come in pairs.

- Almost every kind of star turns out to come in pairs.

Our sun is kind of weird that it doesn't have another companion just as us small by comparison neutron stars are the end, like white dwarfs are the end for a star.

Like the sun neutron stars are the end for much bigger stars.

We'll talk about that actually more with supernovas.

And there's a bunch of spoilers so we won't go into it yet, but at the end of it you end up with this incredibly dense lump of stuff that isn't even atoms anymore.

It's all compressed neutrons and again it's the weight of an entire star.

But if you go to the next picture it's compressed down into something roughly the size of San Francisco or Manhattan.

It's so dense like my colleague was saying that a teaspoonful of it weighs about as much as an entire mountain and it's so heavy that its gravity starts to bend space and time and so full of energy that when two of them collide, well we'll see what happens in the movie.

- Yeah so we're gonna actually see a clip once again from Spark.

- So we're gonna start off by looking at those two neutron stars.

And you may notice that ours are red.

Bruce's image was kinda whitish.

We're not quite sure exactly what they look like.

So it's more of kind of, this is our artist rendition of it.

However, all of our clips are based in science so we actually can see that warp of space and time because they are so heavy it might seem very similar to like a black hole in how we depict them as well.

So as they're orbiting each other, they are moving so fast that we're actually slowing down time really, really slowly and their collision takes less than a second to happen.

And what I love about all of these images and our renderings is that we work with the scientists to create these and eventually that huge amount of energy will create those very heavy elements like Bruce was saying.

- So what are we seeing here?

This is where they've kind of spun so fast?

- And they've collided with each other moving at pretty much the speed of light smashing into each other so hard with enough energy.

It's the only way we know to make heavy elements like gold as they crash into each other, they actually create ripples in space and time.

They're waves in gravity.

And about 10 years ago we figured out how to see these with giant lasers in places like Louisiana and Washington.

This has happened once in the history of astronomy, we saw the gravity ripples, every telescope on earth turned a point in the right direction and saw the explosion.

And about 2000 astronomers all got together to write a paper saying, yeah it looks exactly like we said it would, definitely made gold.

- Chance to pat yourselves on the back.

Thank you so much for the work you've done, we appreciate it.

- I wasn't one of those 2000.

I was like one of the few astronomers didn't make it to that paper.

Yeah, I was asleep.

- All right, well moving forward.

So Jamie, you mentioned some of the things that we're looking for right in this one.

And so part of the things that we're talking about obviously is the gold, the gold leaf.

We mentioned that, we talked about the shape.

So this one that they should be using like icing that's smooth and uniform and they were tasked to do a dome shape Adhiti.

We didn't wanna do anything too bold with this one.

So were you hoping that they would come as close to a dome as possible?

What were you looking for?

- We did, I mean, you know, for the first round we had thought you can do a dome, but if you don't wanna do a dome, you could also do a regularly like traditionally sized cake or shaped cake.

For this one, we kind of required the dome and I mean they're all gorgeous domes and we were also looking for creativity.

I mean we talked about gold, but like silver is also something that is formed from merging neutron stars.

And we can see silver luster dust used here.

Really, really creative use of just like sugar and trying to like get inspired by the elements.

It's very impressive.

- So while we're not going to reveal the precise scores that the judges are using, I will tell you the rating system that they're working with.

So they are rating the cakes on a scale of one to five, one being average, lacking skill, two being good, needing a bit more nuanced skill, three being very good and close to perfection, four being amazing and professional skillset and five being extraordinary.

Let's put this in a museum or maybe in the Cal Academy.

Huh?

- Maybe.

- All right, so I think you all need a chance to deliberate, right?

Give a moment for that.

So in the meantime, if I could have the bakers of these cakes come to the stage please.

Right up to the side.

(audience applauding) That's a lot of bakers.

- Okay so if you could come closer or, let's see here.

So whose cake is this one?

Over here.

Okay, great.

Stay nice and close.

Okay, perfect.

All right.

Oh three of yo two one okay.

That's a lot.

Okay.

That's a lot of people making a lot of cakes.

Okay, so I'll start with you.

You're closest to me here.

Okay so yours has such an impressive top here.

- Thank you.

- I'm really excited.

So tell me what your name is and then as we're getting a closeup of this cake, tell me exactly how you made it and what went inside and what inspired you.

- Sure.

My name is Laura Star.

So I've already won, right?

- Are you kidding me?

Wow.

We could not have planned that better.

All right, so tell us more.

- This is a black magic chocolate cake with salted caramel buttercream.

It's got a cinnamon toffee, almond pretzel space dust.

I'm calling it both around the little side here and filling between the layers.

It's got a mirror glaze and my friend in the beginner category, it took me three times to get this mirror glaze to work.

- So don't give up.

- Don't give up.

No.

And then I've got some hard candy pulsars coming out of it.

- Ah, tell us more about what you learned about pulsars.

- Not as much as these people in the other category.

- Okay, well maybe we'll have Bruce do that for us.

- I understand pulsars happen.

- Amazing.

Amazing.

Great job.

Okay, so there was the two of you here who baked this.

Okay so introduce yourselves and then tell us exactly how you made this cake, which is so beautiful on the inside.

I told you they love this part.

It just never gets old.

Oh, I'll show that off too.

All right, so tell me your names and tell me how you made the cake, what goes inside of it, what was your inspiration?

- My name is Harry.

- My name is Mira.

- And we were inspired by two neutron stars collision.

And so as we have here two neutron stars with the outer coating and like the ripplings of the gravitational waves, so like we try to use like hair dryer, things like that to create little waves that the explosion and the curvatures and all that.

And then as you cut inside the cake, you can see the transition from a very light blue into like a very dark, like red intense.

So like scientists have said that like with neutron stars, they can range from like blue to like dark red and black.

So yeah, we got those inspirations and the shapes and the colors.

- Bruce, are you learning some stuff over here?

All right, so and then, so the cake inside, did you tell me the flavor already?

- No.

So I'll be talking about the flavors.

So we were inspired by the element of iodine.

We actually, all three of us work at a company called Wild Type.

We're actually making a cultivated seafood and we work on salmon flavor.

And so I was like, okay, I work with a lot of seaweed, so let's incorporate seaweed into this because it has a lot of iodine.

So in the middle we have a, a white miso vanilla cake and a black sesame buttercream just fitting with the Japanese theme.

And then it's dusted with furikake and simi togarashi, which is a Japanese seasoning.

So we get a little bit of seaweed, a little bit of sesame, a little bit of spice.

- Wow, that's amazing.

I wonder, I'm gonna be curious how the judges got the taste and if it was incredibly savory.

Did you try it?

- We did, but we're used to it.

So we're excited to see what other people think.

- And then sounds like you all know each other.

Okay, interesting.

Do not judge this.

We did not fix this competition at all.

But look, here's the, may I tilt it?

Is this okay?

Okay.

You can see the use of the hairdryer you used.

To create the ripples.

Okay.

So the three of you together made this one here.

Okay.

So who wants to tell me about the inspiration for the outside of the cake?

- I can do that.

- What's your name?

- My name is Ella.

And then do you guys wanna - I'm Kanil.

- And I'm Wilson.

- So our cake is a pulsar, it's a spinning neutron star, which has these jets of electromagnetic radiation or caramels coming out of its magnetic poles.

So here it can spin.

And it has here this gas accretion disc, which is presumably coming from some other, you know, star body in the system, which is sort of powering the emission of the electromagnetic radiation.

So we have marzipan crust representing sort of the crust on a neutron star.

And then on the inside we were also inspired by iodine.

So for us we went with eggs.

Eggs are a really rich source of iodine.

Our cake is a really rich source of eggs.

There are 20 eggs in this cake.

So we wanted to use eggs for flavor, but also for structure.

So we have layers of an orange chiffon cake and a pistachio dacquoise and then a orange blossom ermine icing.

We didn't use seaweed as a flavor component, but we did use carrageenan, which is a seaweed extract to sort of thicken and stabilize our icing.

- Wow.

That is a lot of big words.

Amazing.

Amazing.

How many people in the audience are familiar with dacquoise?

Okay, do you wanna explain what that is for everybody?

- Absolutely, it's a meringue, but it has nuts in it.

So you make a meringue and you fold in some nuts and some sugar, and then you've got dacquoise.

- All right, perfect.

Amazing.

Let's give 'em all a hand.

(audience applauding) Okay so it seems like the judges are ready.

- It was close, y'all, it was really, really, really close.

I feel like as we continue, it just gets like this much more.

- So what did you love?

- So we loved for, you know, number 17, we thought that the decoration was really gorgeous, that accuracy was beautiful and the use of gold and silver is just so pretty.

And we also like noticed the electromagnetic field and we were very impressed by that.

For 40, the one in the middle, oh my gosh, such beautiful work done.

We really loved the elements that you had used of like gold luster dust and them sort of like going together, like merging together that was not required.

And they did it, which is amazing.

And then finally, for number 18 here, we thought the decoration was gorgeous, the flavor was so good, but ultimately we decided that 17 is our winner.

Amazing.

Amazing.

Really great work.

(audience applauding) And it kind of felt like a princess cake.

- Our original idea, oh, our original idea was to do a princess cake, but princess cakes usually have this big mound of pastry cream and we were worried that that wouldn't be stable at room temperature for a long time.

So we had to pivot.

- Amazing.

- So we're gonna have a prize for you if you wouldn't mind taking your cake.

Yeah, of course.

Congratulations.

Okay, great, great, great.

All right, we're ready.

So that was a lot of fun.

And then now we're heading into our advanced round.

Okay.

Let's just go ahead and pull back the curtain here.

(audience cheering) Oh, this is the best.

They're really pretty.

So before we, before we even do anything, I just wanna say that, you know, Adhiti and Jamie, as we were planning out what we were going to ask of bakers, I think that we were really cautious of saying, you know, what can people actually create?

And I think we all decided, let's push the boundaries, let's see what they can do.

Let's say make a spherical cake.

- Okay, I'll be honest with y'all, I'll be honest with y'all, I'm kind of hidden behind a post here.

So we had thought originally that this would just be a dome cake.

And then I think it was Cecilia and a few others at KQED who were like, no, push 'em a little further.

Do a spherical cake.

And we're like, no, no, no, no people, how will people do that?

I don't even know, I don't know how to do that.

But what is this?

What did y'all do?

- Amazing.

I'm so impressed.

- Sphere.

Yes, absolutely a sphere.

I'm like, okay, maybe.

But floating spheres, that was just.

- I don't understand y'all.

- And glowing spheres.

- I'm truly impressed.

I don't really know how a cake like this could be made.

Jamie, can you tell us a little bit more about like structurally how you can kind of do something like this?

- No, I'm just kidding.

So these cakes are absolutely amazing.

They're like literally hovering.

So structurally you're definitely gonna need some, I mean, they built structures in order to have these cakes floating or appear to be floating.

So these here actually have a structure that jets out and there's a cake board inside and the cake is actually built on top of that, which is kind of nuts.

So that's how you get that floating.

This one here, this boggled my mind because I was so afraid to cut this cake.

And because you can see it, it actually moves.

Dangling there.

So cutting down into that cake was pretty scary.

So again, they built out a structure.

There's a cake board inside.

I don't know if you can see from the side, but there is a cake board there.

And again, the cake is built around it.

But in order to do this and to do it properly, there is so much structural engineering going on.

Let alone putting a light inside of a cake.

That, I mean, that's pretty.

- So exciting.

And then of course the shaping just in general, just to get that sphere shape.

- Sphere shape are so difficult to make.

And it, it's just as round as these cakes are, I mean these, these are beyond, yeah, advanced.

So really congratulations to all four of these cakes.

- Amazing.

(audience applauding) All right so Bruce, let's talk about the science portion here.

So we had the prompt for everyone of a supernova for this final advanced round.

Let's talk a little bit about what that means and what comes together, what elements come out of this sort of phenomenon in space?

We have an image, here we go.

- What you're seeing here is a picture of what's left over after a supernova.

This is a supernova that exploded in our galaxy some time ago.

There's a huge cloud of gas expanding outwards.

And the different colors trace different elements that are present like sodium, like potassium, like iron that are made in the explosion.

But if we rewind it a little bit, I can talk about what it looks like before the supernova on the next slide.

So the supernova is the end fate of a star that's much bigger than the sun.

It does the stuff the sun does.

Turns hydrogen into helium, keeps going, turns helium into carbon and nitrogen and oxygen and then keeps going after that.

Well we don't need to slide.

Layer after layer, there we go.

Layer after layer, it finds a new source of fuel.

It turns carbon into oxygen, it turns oxygen into neon, which is hard to put in a cake.

So we don't have it, turns neon into magnesium, turns magnesium into silicon and it ends up within its center a lump of iron.

And iron is the most stable element in the universe.

There's no way to get energy by burning it.

And so that lump of iron just sort of sits there as the rest of the star gets heavier and goes through these phases faster and faster.

It takes a million years to use up all its hydrogen.

It takes about four days to burn up all its silicon.

And then when it finally runs outta fuel again, we can go to the movie now.

- So we can actually see, so we can actually can see that kinda loss of gravity for the inner core.

And so we actually-- - A star that's about to explode again.

Again, we've slowed down time a lot here so that we can see the star itself.

And it's not that round spherical shape anymore.

It's kind of this weird fluffy shape.

And now we've actually dove into the core of the star.

So what we're seeing is different elements.

So the dark blue is gonna be our carbon.

The green is oxygen, yellow is silicon.

And kinda the really, really light blue at the very center, that's that iron core that we saw.

And this whole simulation actually took about six different types of data simulations from different scientists all over the world to create just this timeframe.

Do you know how they do it?

I think Bruce would be better at explaining that.

- These are huge supercomputer things where they put in everything we understand about physics, everything we understand about atoms, everything we understand about gravity and turn it on.

And then nine times out of 10 it doesn't explode, it just sits there because they've got some of the math wrong.

And so they go back and tweak the math because we know the damn things do explode.

We actually see these, these are the the brightest explosions we see in the universe.

One of them went off near our sun about 500 years ago and you could see it in daylight.

It was a star that shown in the day, you could read by it at night.

Even now we can see the cloud left behind it.

Now back then we didn't have telescopes.

Every astronomer is now opening one goes off close to the earth now that we have telescope so we can study it not too close to the earth 'cause you kind of don't wanna be right next to the biggest explosions in the universe here.

- And so we're actually now witnessing that explosion.

And again, we're slowing down time, but what we're seeing in that core is actually about the size of San Francisco.

So we can really get an example of how big this is.

And eventually it's actually going to start pushing out all of those elements it already created in its lifetime.

So this is how we're gonna be able to see that in that cloud.

- And these also make a lot of radioactive elements which we have chosen not to have incorporated into cakes for obvious safety reasons, but is responsible for getting a lot of the sort of weird exotic light elements out into the universe to make life out of, for example.

- And each different explosion's gonna give us a different kind of formation of the cloud.

And again, we call it a supernova.

And basically nova just means cloud esque thing.

So anything we see that's kind of fuzzy and cloudy, then it does.

So as it continues to expand, it takes about a couple days to be the size of our solar system, but eventually over a long period of time, like centuries, it will continue to expand to a sphere of almost 10 light years.

And that's the distance, how long it takes light, the fastest thing that we know of to travel from one side to the other in 10 years.

So this is huge.

- And so at this point, what are we seeing right now?

- So we are seeing again the different elements, kind of the shell.

I like to say it's kind of those layers being pushed out a little bit more.

And you can see that again, it's not spherical either, so it's going to have different ways of coming out.

And what we saw earlier is actually a picture of that in x-ray.

So we don't just look it in the light that we see with our own eyes, we also look at it in different wavelengths of light.

- So basically for our bakers to be able to kind of create anything even similar, the closest thing we can come to is, is seeing like a sphere.

- Basically.

Yeah.

- Okay.

Well I think that you all are still finishing up your tasting but maybe are ready to begin the judging process.

Before we do, let's talk about the types of elements that kind of come out of here and the flavors that would be in these cakes that you'd be looking for.

- So this actually, should I stand over there?

Maybe?

I'll come over this way so y'all can see me.

So this one is interesting because like, first off I just wanna say this was such a hard category.

All the other categories have like three cakes or like, you know, three contestants.

This one had four.

It was just so, it was so stiff.

The competition was like very, very close.

So we felt like we needed four for this round.

It's interesting 'cause the supernova creates so many different elements.

So we really had our pick of what we wanted the bakes to be inspired by.

So we're looking for cakes that have sodium, so maybe flaky sea salt, you know, our salty foods, something like that.

Magnesium with chocolate.

I see chocolate all over the place here.

It's so great.

But they could have also used almonds or chickpeas or Brazil nuts or anything like that.

They could have also used potassium.

So you know, they could have done like bananas or oranges or honeydew, apricots, all kinds of varieties we've got here.

- What were some of the flavors that you've caught in these?

- Oh, I definitely, well for me a lot of the flavors, it's not just the flavors, it's also the textures of the cake.

So having a cake have a little bit of crunch.

So you definitely saw that in a lot of the cakes.

So there is definitely the nuts that were in there.

I definitely tasted apricot and I could be wrong, but I definitely tasted apricot in there as well.

Flaky sea salt, love a little bit of salt inside any cake that really just kind of dulls down the sugar a little bit and really amplifies the flavor of chocolate.

Which is really nice.

- And gives you that sense of elements.

- Exactly.

- All right, so shall I give you all a moment to deliberate?

And while we do, let's have our bakers come to the stage, the four of you.

(audience applauding) If you wouldn't mind coming this way.

There we go.

Okay so let's see here.

I'll start with you.

You're right here.

And if you all wouldn't just mind like kind of staggering like immediately behind your cake, just if someone's shorter.

There you go.

Nice and tight.

All right, so tell me your names and tell me what you made for your cake.

What's your name?

- Sophie.

- Hi Sophie.

Nice to meet you.

And what's your name?

- I'm Nina Baker.

She's Sophie, my little assistant.

- So your last name's Baker?

- It is Baker, yes.

We represent.

- And I love the outfits.

- Matching galaxies.

- You're matching galaxies.

And it looks like that maybe inspired even the colors of your cake.

What did you do here and how did you make it?

- So I really zeroed it on chocolate.

I love chocolate.

It has magnesium.

I was like, right on.

Let's go chocolate.

So we have layers of chocolate fudge cake.

If I could turn it.

So I actually build the bottom of the sphere so it touches in a single point out of modeling chocolate.

So it's chocolate all the way down.

So I have about two inches of modeling chocolate to gimme sort of a little bit of a base, but it's edible too.

And then I have the layers of chocolate fudge cake, Swiss buttercream with more dark chocolate in it.

And then for the filling to touch on that potassium, I've made a kumquat, orange and apricot curd.

So it has all three fruit with potassium in it.

The curd is kind of creamy.

All the fruit is actually from my town.

It's all local.

So that's pretty exciting.

And then I combined that with a toffee for the salty element.

So I made a pretzel almond and pistachio toffee and a dark chocolate ganache to have kind of that denser creaminess inside.

And then to preserve the spherical shape since buttercream can be dicey with that kind of thing.

I also covered it in ganache before I put the mirror glaze.

So I wanted to represent kind of that space in the expanding cloud where you kind of see space through a supernova.

So I wanted to do the, you know, the splatter of the stars.

There's a lot of glitter for all the different shininess of stars.

And then the nebula of the cloud is represented by these little paper.

It's wafer paper, it's all edible.

And then the magical bit it glows just like our cloud.

I didn't have a stable light to shine through it, but my little assistant can shine the front of it.

- Perfect.

Great.

Okay.

Round of applause.

That was great.

Okay, thank you.

I'm gonna step right here to the nice and close.

Maybe you can peek your head to the side over here.

There you go.

All right, come forward.

What are your names and what did you do with your cake?

- I'm Olivia.

- And I'm Rachelle.

And we're also wearing our space shirts.

- Oh yeah, we're gonna have to here, come on over here.

We're gonna have you come over so you can show everybody your shirt.

Let's go this way.

There you go.

Oh, okay.

We're gonna get a close up.

Don't worry.

Actually let's see here too.

I want to be able to show off.

It's really heavy.

Okay, you do it.

Go ahead and grab it and then tilt it just a little bit this way to the side, that way.

Oh there we go.

Let's just leave it there for one second.

All right, so now that we're taking a look at the inside of your cake, how did you make it and what was your inspiration for the flavors?

- So after reading the required elements, I knew I wanted to base the cake flavors around Terry's orange chocolate.

I don't know if you're familiar with it over the holidays, but they also have it for Easter.

Hey Target.

But, so just for stability purposes, the bottom half is not cake, but it's marbled orange chocolate Rice Krispies treats.

And then the top half of the sphere is cake and it's orange chocolate marble cake.

And there is orange chocolate Swiss buttercream.

So that covers the magnesium and the potassium elements.

And then for the filling, I have miso, salted caramel and a sweet and salty crumble, which is made of ruffles and pretzels, which covers the sodium component.

And then the whole thing is en robed in dark chocolate ganache, which with a little bit of orange zest.

- Let's go ahead and twist it back towards the front so they can see the front of it again.

So we can talk about the outside and how you decorated it.

- Then it's decorated with colored royal icing.

And then this is a wafer paper lace, so everything's edible minus the structure.

- All right.

Hello.

You two look familiar as well, is that correct?

- We were here last year.

- Okay, well welcome back.

And you've actually made it to the advanced round on stage.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

This is my memory, I'm actually doing this from memory.

You were the people's choice winner before, right?

Okay and also tell me, because this is not planned, none of this is planned, but you all actually are like pretty extreme bakers.

Tell everybody.

- Well we have our home bakery business in Los Altos.

We live in Los Altos, California.

So it was a drive to get up here, but the cake survived and yeah, it's called La Jawab Treats.

And we started three years ago.

- Yeah.

And my brother was actually on food networks, kids baking championship and he won the show.

- It's amazing.

Amazing.

Okay, so I think that we're going to be able to see your cake.

So while it's facing the audience, can you tell them about the outside and just the way that it looks and how you created the actual face of it?

Tell me how you did that.

- Yeah, so the bottom portion of it is basically kind of representing a galaxy.

It has some white fruit dice, flatters to represent stars, some mini gold star sprinkles on it too.

And then the top is the actual exploding supernova and it hasn't completely exploded yet.

And so that's why there is actually a light inside of it.

I don't know if you can see it right now, but there's a light inside of it, which is going through the, through the, through all the candies and that's representing the core of the supernova.

And then it's slowly exploding.

And then we also made some glass shards with yellow and red to just represent some fire.

- All right.

And then tell me about the actual cake itself that you have inside here.

- So the flavor, we made a moist vanilla cake and we soaked it in freshly squeezed orange juice from our backyard.

And then, yeah.

- And then for the fillings we have a blackberry orange compo and a brown butter sage buttercream.

And then it's wrapped in a white chocolate ganache.

And then it also has some toasted almonds for those elements.

- All right.

So here's what I'm gonna see if we can do, can we get the lights to dim?

If that's possible.

If we could have the lights dim much like we do for the videos.

Oh my gosh, it worked.

Amazing.

Amazing.

I'm gonna stand on the other side of you here.

All right.

I'm also not gonna touch this one just for fear of what could possibly happen.

So if you could introduce yourselves and then tell me the inspiration for the outside of the cake and how you did it.

How did you make this?

- Okay, so my name is Quincy.

- I'm Jonathan, Quincy's dad.

- And so when we started brainstorming for the cake, we were like, we wanna make it hanging.

And so we have like a cake board and then a pole and there's more cake on the bottom and there's like a tiny metal disc that's holding it up.

And then we have this string going through the middle that's just, you know.

- So tell me about the colors that you put on the outside and why you decided to design it the way that you did.

- So the colors we did, because they were the colors of the frosting on the inside and we didn't really feel like changing color.

- That's fair.

That's fair.

That's fair.

That's absolutely fair.

Okay, so if you wouldn't mind helping me, I'm gonna have you do this, but if you could just tilt it so that we can see and just turn it out that way so that they can see.

There we go.

Exactly.

Oh, spinning.

Keep spinning.

So keep spinning.

All right, there we go.

Right there.

Oh, now it's gonna go too far.

Okay.

Well, Bruce, is that is, I mean, this is what supernovas do, right?

It's just kind of spinning around.

All right, there we go.

Oh, and it's coming back around.

Okay.

What are the flavors inside of the cake?

- So we have a lot of flavors.

So the inside is like a Mexican hot chocolate and it's a little bit spicy.

And then we have a spicy cinnamon frosting and another little layer of chocolate, and that was for magnesium.

And then we have dolce leche and it has popcorn in it for sodium.

And there's a confetti cake and we have, oh my god, a ginger coconut frost.

Yes, ginger coconut.

And we also have mango coconut cake.

There's a strawberry cake and we put in fresh.

Sorry.

- It's been a long day.

- You've been baking a while.

It sounds like there's a lot of cake in here.

- So we put in fresh strawberries and like strawberry powder from dehydrated ones.

- And it also looks like there's, is there cake on the bottom here on the base?

- That's more of the chocolate and more cinnamon and then mirror glaze.

So it's like, it's like the rest of the sky.

- Amazing.

Let's give it up for these bakers.

(audience applauding) All right, so it looks like you've deliberated.

- It was very, very, very close.

So we loved, you know, 28, we loved the flavor of it and the decoration was just gorgeous so, so pretty.

For 29, we thought that the flavor was so good and it's also incredibly creative.

Like, we don't understand how, I don't, I still don't get it.

I don't get it.

And we also noticed that, you know, they used wafer paper, which I believe is made from potato starch.

Right?

Which is like some of that sodium element.

So that's amazing.

And we also thought 39 was so creative.

I mean that, that light inside, like, I don't even understand.

For 38, the flavor was great.

It's so interesting.

Y'all had so many things coming out of it.

Like a supernova would have like mass shooting out of it.

Like we could feel all the textures and the crunch, the popcorn.

Oh my God.

But ultimately we decided that 29 was the winner.

(audience applauding) - You've got the winning advanced cake, so yes.

Yes.

Applauding, applauding.

I grab.

There you go.

- Can you just give us a little bit more about what you learned ultimately and what was the most exciting thing that came out of learning more about the science portion of this as you built your cake?

- I learned that driving with a cake is very scary from San Jose.

I didn't know if I was gonna open up the trunk with a big blob.

But yeah, I just love learning about what a supernova is doing.

Doing a lot of Googling again, just, yeah, I love astronomy.

- What were you most excited about from the surround and seeing the creativity and were you inspired by anything for your own amazing cakes?

- I'm gonna have to up my game now.

I have to make suspending cakes and I was dealt the daunting task of cutting these cakes or the advanced cakes.

And that was just, the suspending cake was just insane.

So there's so much inspiration there.

I mean, the cakes were absolutely amazing and just the textures and the crunch and the use of the elements were just amazing.

Like they just incorporating even the potato starch on the outside of the winning cake was really, really impressive, and the lights.

- Bruce, what do you hope that folks come away with from an event like this and learning more about science and these sorts of things with stars and their explosions and the elements?

- The biggest thing is how we're kind of all connected to the universe.

That this process that started with really boring stuff and simple laws of physics in the first, first seconds turns into these incredibly beautiful galaxies, makes stars, makes planets.

And also that the process that does it isn't unique here.

Part of what we try and do in astronomy is understand how this operates elsewhere.

And if there's other people out there having cake judging on their own planets.

- Ooh, Twilight theme playing in the background.

Thank you Bruce.

Can you please join me in thanking all of the amazing bakers that came out tonight?

(audience applauding) If you wanna see more programming like this, go to KQED.org/live so you can come back to our event space and have a great time like we did tonight.

Thank you all so much, enjoy the cake.

(audience applauding) (upbeat music)