I was too busy to have time to bake something, I decided to go with something that I had in the house - so I'm using a King Cake. For those of you who don't know its officially Mardi Gras season (Twelfth night to Fat Tuesday i.e. Jan 6 to March 8 this year). During Mardi Gras one of the traditions is to have a King Cake. The King Cake is in celebration of the 3 kings that visited Christ. It is traditionally oval in shape to commemorate our journey through life. The top of it is decorated with three colors: yellow for power, purple for justice and green for faith. The tradition is to hide a baby in the cake. The person who gets the baby, ie the first person to touches the baby as they cut into it when they cut their piece, is suppose to have the next party with another king cake. That person then becomes king or queen for the day. (In our house that means getting out of doing chores).
The King cake tradition is a time for family and friends to get together and celebrate life. We have been to so many places with king cakes it seems like someone in my family is always getting one and we need to fulfill our obligation of passing it on. Because of the football end of season playoffs it was the perfect excuse to have a king cake at our house since we had friends and family coming over to watch the games with us. In fact because the games occurred over a couple of weekend we ended up having more than one king cake at our house. Here's more on King Cakes with Wikipedia.
So here's the first cake that was eaten with the baby hidden inside.
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| Typical King Cake |
So now you are wondering where the geology comes in. At one point I thought of considering it as a concretion, or a volcanic crater but decided against those.
The whole fun of the King Cake is finding the baby inside of it.
To me it always reminded me of the fun I used to have looking for fossils out in the field. You never knew where you would find one and if you did what shape it would be in. It was more the fun of finding the treasure than it was having it to add to your collection.
So I decided to wait until the baby was found in a piece and then take that picture. I thought it would just be a baby in bread. A simple fossil in a uniform sedimentary stone. But with King cakes they are made with different ingredients inside the bread as well as having the the baby hidden inside. Some of the different ingredients I have seen used are: cream cheese, pralines, strawberries or as with this one -- cinnamon. I wasn't expecting to get the geologic display that I did with these cakes. Here's the first one with the baby found. It reminded me of purple mountains, and my structural geology class where we studied anticlines and geosynclines.
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| King cake with a baby in it. |
I thought I should classify it as an overturned anticline Here's the scan of the picture that was used in my structural text book to explain overturned anticlines. Structural Geology, 3rd ed. By Marland P. Billings (1972)pg 46. It also reminded me of the picture that was used in the introduction of the book so I also included that picture as well.
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| Plate 7B. Overturned anticline, Panter Gap, Rockbridge County, VA |
Photo: N. H. Darton, U.S. Geologic Survey.
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| Structural Geology 3rd ed, by Marland P. Billings. |
It also reminded me of a formation I saw last year when I went to the Sundance film festival, in Utah.
This is a picture I took on the way to the Sundance resort where we stayed at while attending the festival. Here's the link to the Sundance Resort. I think I took this picture from Highway 15 looking east to the Mount Timpanogos - Wasatch, Utah but I'm not positive about this since I was riding on a bus. It looked like a faulted geosyncline but not being able to get out and really look at it I wasn't able to tell for sure.
One cake wasn't enough and we had another one and here's the baby in the second one. Again I thought of the same things as I did with the first.
My description of the King Cake,
Alluvial sediments are sitting on top of a mound, underneath there is a thin layer of mud mixed with ice/snow holding it in place. Near the surface there is a cave in the sedimentary layer. The formation has been under extreme heat and pressure resulting in an overturn anticline. Embedded in the layers, fossils of the Homo sapiens variety may some times be found.
Finally when ever I look at King cakes I think of the song from the movie The Lion King - Circle of life.
