If Darwin was a pastry chef, what would he make?

Yesterday at the SCQ, a short paper was published describing a "Kingdom Cake," whereby the various layers represented the different kingdom designations. The cake itself was pretty cool, but made all the more impressive by its competition at a full on bake off for Darwin's birthday back on February 12th.

The range was marvelous, and as I sampled them, I kept wondering what type of baking would Darwin himself have preferred, or even prepared himself. In any event, here are a couple of highlights.

Firstly, the aforementioned "Kingdom Cake"

Accompanying this cake came was a paper entitled "On Evolution, Kingdoms, and the Galapagos Islands: a Treatise on Darwin's Contributions to Modern Ecology and Evolution in Cake Form". The layers were made from the following:

Monera - probiotic yogurt cake
Protista - green kelp diatom cake
Fungi - polish yeast cake
Plantae - zucchini cake
Animalia - honey cake
Genetically modified icing, coconut finch nest, Japanese white chocolate almond ptarmigan egg and spinach seaweed

And here is the scientific schematic of the finished creation:

Next up, we have this pair of snake-like creations:

Illustrating the evolution of mimicry, one of these snakes is a venomous coral snake, the other one is a copycat. Further inspection revealed coral snakes can be identified by the presence of red velvet cake on the inside. Entry by the Riesberg Lab.

Then we have this very odd looking cake:

Titled the "Host Dependant Replicate", this cake featured chocolate eggs containing instructions for producing the next generation of cakes, with both variability and heritability on which for Natural Selection to act. Cake by David Nogas.

I thought this next one was pretty clever:

This cake from the Myers Lab shows the story of the Evolution of the Peppered Moth. Observational data suggests light and dark cookie moths are eaten at equal frequencies by human predators, independent of the lightness of the tree on which they are resting.

But at the end of it all, I think my personal favourite was this one:

Anyway, lots more to see at the Vancouver Evolution site.