Under the Sea

I love making cakes, especially for friends’ birthdays. Yesterday was my housemate Mitchell’s birthday, and he requested a carrot cake but did not specify a shape. Given his ardent love for sea slugs, I decided to make him a sea slug cake:

Turns out sea slugs (and related sea creatures) are frequently quite gorgeous, and a few of them have some pretty neat skills. For instance, there’s a couple species of slug that can eat sunlight. And there’s a sea slug which feeds on Portuguese man-o-wars. Not only is it immune to their nematocysts (stingers), it collects them in sacs, concentrating the poison until it’s even more dangerous to the touch than its prey.

My favorite creature I’ve discovered in the course of making this cake is not actually a sea slug - it’s a “sea squirt”, a fairly simple organism that starts off life with a rudimentary brain (really a ganglion), uses it to find a home, and then says, “Well, I guess I don’t need this any more” and digests it.