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?