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So say you're ruining yet another batch of cookies because, who knows, too much butter?
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not enough flour? didn't chill the dough long enough?
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Could be anything, there's too many variables and this is why baking from scratch is hard
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and I'll stick with mathematics thank you very much.
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But I do know one delicious recipe that's hard to get wrong.
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And by the way this video is in VR180 so use a headset or look around by moving your phone
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or dragging the video because today we're making Monkeybread.
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Monkeybread, aka puzzle bread or pull-apart bread, is a classic american food invented
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in the 1970s to take advantage of pre-prepared refrigerated biscuit dough for an easy-to-make
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snack suitable for groups of children and/or adults with no plates or utensils necessary.
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I'll be making the dough bits round to better simulate properties of Voronoi diagrams, but
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the basic idea is that each ball of dough is like a little cell coated in cinnamon sugar,
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and large amounts of brown sugar butter.
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Lots and lots of butter.
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In the oven all these spheres of dough will expand and develop facets as they smoosh into
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each other, so they're more polygonal and no longer spheres.
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What kind of shapes would you expect the cells to form?
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Let's go back to my batch of cookie, and I'll use icing to draw the lines where the
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cookieblobs hit each other.
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It looks a lot like a Voronoi diagram, which is a kind of diagram where you start with
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a bunch of points, or, cookiedough blobs, and then it's as if each point spreads out
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until it gets all the area that's close to it, or at least, closer to it than to any
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other point.
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If you started with points organized into a very efficient cookie packing like this,
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then the Voronoi diagram would look like a bunch of hexagons, except on the edges where
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technically the cell includes the slice of space going infinitely off the cookie sheet,
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not that I have enough dough for infinitely large cookies, which just marks another place
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where mathematical theory is better than the realities of baking.
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But for our more randomly placed cookie blob sheet, the Voronoi cells are irregular polygons,
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and these look pretty typical for 2D Voronoi cells.
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But what about 3D Voronoi cells?
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There's many theoretically perfect way to pack spheres together where they'd expand
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into perfectly fitting cubes or rhombic dodecahedra or other fun shapes, but when you toss all
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the dough balls randomly into a bundt pan we'll get more typical random Voronoi cells.
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I mean it's not quite mathematically Voronoi-y because of how dough works and physics but
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it's similar enough that our Monkeybread bits will have that distinctive Voronoi flavor.
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The Bundt pan, by the way, not only makes genus 0 baked goods into genus 1 baked goods,
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but the hole in the middle adds surface area, which is not only great for having lots of
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glaze or crust but essential for Monkeybread in particular so that more cells are on the
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surface.
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You eat it by just grabbing a cell and pulling it apart from the bread, and the toroidal
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shape means you can pick at it from all sides, including inside.
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Bundt pans also provide areas of both negative and positive curvature to observe, which helps
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better simulate a comparison to the formation of epithelial cells, hence the Scutoid connection
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(more about scutoids next time).
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Altogether, Monkeybread is quite the mathematical snack.