The Phospholipid Membrane Cake - Christmas, Year 13

 

Spending our last week making a membrane out of chicken wire, pipe-cleaners and polystyrene meant that we didn’t even have to think of this one, but it took longer than we thought.  We had to put little feet on it when we realised it was going to be pathetically small if we didn’t, and even then it was a bit of a diddy cake, especially in comparison to the others (which tend to use several times the recommended amounts of cake mix and upwards of half a kilogram of icing).  It didn’t cause too many problems and wasn’t at all difficult, it was just a bit fiddly, and we sort of ate a lot of the stuff we were meant to be making it out of; cutting all those fatty acid chains out of apple-flavoured bootlaces couldn’t really be done without eating half of them, and then we started chucking the M&Ms around - well you have to, don’t you - and we ran out of banana-things to make ion channels out of (you can just about see two in the picture) because we ate too many.  The green thing sticking out of one of the marshmallows is, I think, a polysaccharide chain, so there was a sort of realism there if nothing else (good job we didn't try to make the proteins out of protein, though).  This one almost certainly tasted well and truly revolting but then, true to form, we didn’t hang around to find out.