Just for fun: trefoil knot complement cake

Based on a joint work with Rob Clancy, presented at the Oxford Mathematical Cake Seminar. You might think that this is just a regular cake.

But it’s not! The icing is in the shape of a trefoil knot, so that the cake itself has the shape of a trefoil knot complement (in ). Here, take a look at the layers before they were put on top of each other:

Random facts about the cake:

-its fundamental groups is the braid group on 3 strands and has presentations ,
-it contains approximately 500 grams of butter, 500 grams of sugar and 7 eggs,
-it admits finite volume metrics with universal covers and ,
-the icing was very buttery,
-it has a Seifert fibration with base orbifold a once-punctured sphere with two cone-points,
-it took an afternoon minus a (spectacular!) rugby match to bake it.

Credits:

Designer: Rob
Manager: Rob
Cook: Rob
Sculptor: Rob
Icing artist: Rob
Dish washing: Alex