Much can be said about the culinary aspects of cake baking. How much of and
which types of ingredients are used to determine the flavor of the cake. However,
is flavor the only ingredient for taste? Does a dry, crumbling cake still satisfy the
pallet? One can control the flavor of the batter, but once it is placed in the oven
for baking, what determines the consistency of the finished dessert? We consider a
simple model of the actual baking process which is based on the diffusion equation
@T
@t
= r · (DrT) , (1)
where D is the heat diffusivity of the batter and T is the temperature of the cake at
time t. We begin with this model and numerically investigate solutions for various
cake geometries while also looking at the effects of varying the heat diffusivity over
space and time
