Dessert From a Printer!
Engineers made a piece of cake, but they didn’t use an oven. They used a printer!
Jonathan Blutinger/Columbia Engineering
A printer made this piece of cake!
Most people use an oven to make a cake. But not long ago, engineers made a piece of cake with no mixing bowls and no oven. Instead, they used a 3D printer!
Most printers put words or pictures on paper. But 3D printers create, or print out, three-dimensional objects. Three-dimensional objects aren’t flat. They have a length, a width, and a height. One example of a three-dimensional object is a piece of cake.
The 3D printed cake had seven ingredients—graham cracker paste, peanut butter, strawberry jam, Nutella (a chocolate and nut spread), mashed banana, cherry drizzle, and frosting. All the ingredients had to be liquid. Engineers put each ingredient into a tiny tube. Then the printer squeezed the ingredients out into the shape of a piece of cake, layer by layer. As it printed, the machine used lasers to heat the paste, which cooked it.
Jonathan Blutinger/Columbia Engineering
Engineers put ingredients such as peanut butter into the printer’s tubes.
The engineers call their cake a “cheesecake.” There was no cheese in the cake, but it was creamy, just like many cheesecakes.
But was it as good as an oven-baked cheesecake?
“It definitely tasted like something I hadn’t tried before,” Jonathan Blutinger told the Guardian. Blutinger was one of the engineers who created the cake. “I rather enjoyed it, but it’s not [made of the usual ingredients].”
People have made food with 3D printers before. There’s even a restaurant that serves 3D printed meals. Why print a meal? Engineers say that printers are better than people at measuring ingredients.
Would you eat printed food?
Jonathan Blutinger/Columbia Engineering
Engineers did many tests before they printed out a nice piece of cake. Can you tell why this test failed?
