Monday, July 19, 2010

The Cupcake Experiment: Results

After setting up the Cupcake Experiment I checked in on my 8 subjects 6 hours, 12 hours, and 48 hours later. (I meant to check them every 6 hours but I'm on toddler time & that's the best I could do.)

For a while pretty much everything looked like this:


No holes.

But late Sunday night, the foil wrapper that was in the refrigerator with the dull (a.k.a Flat a.k.a. matte) side toward the cake looked like this:


You can see 4 or 5 holes, both where the goopy bits of cake were and further out where the foil was touching the cakey bits.

The final results:



(Tenuous) Conclusions:
  • Refrigeration contributes to the corrosive effects of cupcakes on aluminum foil.
  • The shiny side of foil is somewhat resistant to corrosion.
  • It is unclear whether cupcake goopiness is a contributing factor in the corrosion of aluminum foil.
.................OR.....................
  • I royally screwed up this experiment. People smarter than me say that the first holes I found accidentally were partially because of the metal pan.


I plan to repeat this experiment the next time I make cupcakes. This time, however, I'll make a few changes to incorporate the presence of a metal pan into the equation. Any other variables I should consider?

New Questions:
  1. Why is the goopy part of a cupcake goopy (is it the oil/butter thing I mentioned in the last post?) and does that contribute to corrosive properties?
  2. My original assumption was that the Teflon-coated pan had nothing to do with the holes because the holes only appeared where it touched cake, but in my experiment without a pan it took much longer for holes to appear. So did the pan have factor into it?
  3. Less of a scientific questions and more of a paranoid-mom one: Should the holes in the foil worry me at all? I mean, should I be feeding my kids something that burns holes in foil? Or is this just a harmless chemical reaction that doesn't have anything to do with how foods are actually digested or what damage they may or may not cause to little girls who eat them?

Sunday, July 18, 2010

The Cupcake Experiment

For Kayla's second birthday, we had an Eric Carle-themed party featuring, among other things, a Very Very Hungry Caterpillar cake constructed from upside-down cupcakes arranged in a line. The antenna were made of candles, representing my pixie's two glorious years on this earth.

The cupcakes were a big hit, and I decided to make them again a few weeks later. I didn't have time to frost them after baking, so I let them cool in the Teflon-coated baking pan and then just covered the whole thing with aluminum foil and put it in the refrigerator to deal with later.

The next morning I retrieved the cupcakes and uncovered them to frost them. I found tiny holes in the foil.
They were pin-sized and I never would have noticed them if it weren't for the fact that the morning sun happened to be shining right through the window behind the cake pan in a way that lit up the holes brightly enough to catch my eye.

Notice that the holes are only where the foil was touching the cupcakes.


Apparently something in the cupcakes reacted with and corroded the aluminum. But what?

I used a Betty Crocker cake mix. Following is the ingredients list from the box:

Sugar, Enriched Flour Bleached (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and/or Cottonseed Oil, Modified Corn Starch, Propylene Glycol Monoesters of Fatty Acids, Baking Soda, Salt, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate, Dextrose, Monocalcium Phosphate, Distilled Monoglycerides, Dicalcium Phosphate, Maltodextrin, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Datem, Monoglycerides, Xanthan Gum, Natural and Artificial Flavor, Aluminum Sulfate, Yellow 5&6, Nonfat Milk.

To that I added water and salted butter.

After doing some "research" (if one can call 10 minutes of Googling "holes in aluminum foil" doing research) it seems that salt is the most likely culprit.

I wondered if I could identify any other factors contributing to this phenomenon. The ones I figured I could most easily investigate were:
  1. Temperature: Did refrigerating everything slow down or speed up the corrosion? Did it make a difference at all?
  2. Foil side: Aluminum foil has a flat side and shiny side.* Any difference? (See footnote for more on flat vs. shiny aluminum foil.)
  3. Cake side: The top of a cupcake is always kind of goopy. I believe this is due to butter & oils rising to the top of the mix during baking. The goopy part of a cupcake must have slightly different properties than the cakey parts. Did this contribute to my holey foil?
To test these three factors, I needed 8 different test subjects:
#TemperatureFoil SideCake Side
1 Room Shiny Spongy
2 Cold Shiny Spongy
3 Room Flat Spongy
4 Cold Flat Spongy
5 Room Shiny Goopy
6 Cold Shiny Goopy
7 Room Flat Goopy
8 Cold Flat Goopy


To do this, I cut the top off of a cupcake and quartered it. Then I wrapped them each in carefully folded foil so that part of the foil would touch the goopy bit and part would touch the cakey bit.


Two went in the fridge...


...and two stayed at room temperature.


I observed them over the next two days & recorded the results.

Now, before I post the results, anyone care to form a hypothesis?


*FOOTNOTE: Until a few days ago I thought that there was a functional difference between the flat (or dull, or matte) side of a sheet of aluminum foil and the shiny (or glossy) side. Turns out, there isn't. According to ancient wisdom and Wikipedia, the reason one they look different is that during the manufacturing process, two sheets are run through rollers together to get them nice and thin. Mineral oil is used to lubricate the rollers, rendering the "outside" shiny. When the sheets are pulled apart, the inside is dull. Some believe that you should wrap hot food with the reflective side inward to retain heat better, and cold food with the reflective side outward to keep things colder, but for all practical purposes it really doesn't matter.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Ch-ch-ch-ch Changes

Looks like I haven't posted in over a year. Been a little busy...

We moved into our new house in Ossining, NY at the end of June 2009. We spent the better part that yeas moving, unpacking, fixing, painting, furnishing, mowing, raking, decorating, and cleaning. It's a ton of work, but totally worth it. We love the town, our neighbors, and pretty much everything about it here, including the house itself. We also have a lot more room, which is a good thing because we had our second daughter on 4/13/2010. Kayla was 21 months old when her baby sister Zoe was born. Zoe is a wonderful baby and everyone's doing well.

The move has done wonders for me & my outlook on life in general. The people I now interact with most of the day are more relaxed, less competitive, and more open to new ideas. They seem to make fewer assumptions. I feel like I'm talking to thoughtful people most of the time, instead of just struggling to be polite to people who are stupid or insensitive. Don't get me wrong, there were awesome people in my old neighborhood and there are a few obnoxious people here, but the ratio is completely reversed and it makes life a lot more pleasant. I'm much happier about what Kayla & Zoe will grow up considering "normal behavior" in an environment like this.