That's a Lot of Cake!

I woke up early, so I hopped in the shower and headed down to Sel Marie to grab coffee and a breakfast pastry. About to pay for my small caffeine and gigantic scone, I spotted a cinnamon sour cream coffee cake, roughly three inches tall and ten inches in diameter. (That's a five-inch radius, kid.) I thought, "Hey, something for tomorrow," because it was too early to form complete sentences, and then requested from the barista a slice of the tasty-looking cake. A slice turned out to be one-quarter of the cake! (That's a five-inch slice length, kid.) That is more cake than I should eat first thing in the morning, and, no, putting coffee in front of the word cake does not make it healthier or more appropriate to eat, as though that breakfast-drink modifier transforms the ingredients of said cake into vitamins and fiber.

How much cake is it? Let's do the math. The area of a cake is pi*r^2, assuming a circular cake, which this was. The radius is five inches, kid, and 5^2 is 25. One slice was 1/4 of the cake, so we want to calculate (1/4)(25pi). That comes out to 19.6 square inches of coffee cake. I would calculate the volume but that might make the number bigger.


Now, let's retract for a moment the hasty assertion that coffee cake is just as unhealthy as cake eaten at other times of day. Assuming a Euclidean universe, the word coffee is about equal 0.65, so, going back to the area of our cake, we must perform this calculation: 0.65 * 18.7 square inches (I've eaten some since the last paragraph). This comes out to 12.155 square inches of cake. That's still a foot of cake, so let's get a refill on the coffee and do the calculation again. Now we get 7.9 square inches of cake, which is a hair below 8. The number 8 turned sideways is infinity, which exists only in theoretical terms, and so it follows that my amount of cake almost does not exist. This means that I hardly have any cake at all, which means that my breakfast is not unhealthy. It also means that the barista totally overcharged me.

Well, I guess I'll have to go back tomorrow and get what I was owed, plus a free slice for the inconvenience, a 50%-off coupon as a customer-retention bribe, and an extra slice for Saturday. And an extra slice for Saturday morning. And Saturday is my sister's birthday, so I'll get another slice with a birthday candle to remind me that it's her birthday and a whole cake with many candles for her birthday celebration.

Wait, my sister gets a whole cake?! I'd better get a few extras. And one for the road.