Did you know that wombat poo is shaped like cubes? Celebrate the fascinating reasons for how and why while making some delicious mini lamingtons.
You will need
- Vanilla sponge cake (homemade or store-bought)
- 2 cups shredded coconut
- 1 tablespoon green food colouring
- 4 cups icing sugar
- 1/3 cup cocoa powder
- 1 tablespoon butter
- ½ cup hot water
Equipment
- Knife
- Cutting board
- Freezer
- Large freezer safe container
- Large sealable plastic bag or sealable container
- Baking tray
- Measuring cups
- Large heat-proof mixing bowl
- 2 forks
- Plate
- Microwave (optional)
- Ruler (optional)
Safety
When dealing with food, use clean hands and clean equipment. Be safe while handling knives and hot water. Ask an adult to help you out with these steps.
What to do
Wash your hands.
Make or buy a vanilla sponge cake. You might like to ask an adult if they can teach you a favourite recipe for sponge cake.
Cut your cake into 2 cm squares. Ask an adult to help you with this step.
If your cake squares are taller than 4 cm, cut each piece in half so the height is roughly the same as the 2 cm lengths. You should end up with roughly cube-shaped pieces.
Put your cake cubes in a container and pop them in the freezer for about an hour (freezing makes steps 11 and 12 easier).
Meanwhile, start on your coconut “grass”. Put 2 cups of shredded coconut into a large plastic bag or a sealable container.
Add 1 tablespoon of green food colouring to the container, close it up, and then shake it! If it isn’t green enough, add more food colouring and shake some more.
Pour the green coconut out on a baking tray and spread it out to dry.
Now you’re ready to make the chocolate icing – ask an adult to help you with this step. Using a large heat-proof bowl, mix 4 cups icing sugar, 1/3 cup cocoa powder, 1 tablespoon butter and ½ cup hot water. You’re done mixing once it becomes syrup-y.
Set up your ingredients in the following order: container of cake cubes, bowl of chocolate icing, baking tray of green coconut and empty plate.
Here comes the fun part! Grab two forks and use them to roll the cake cubes in the chocolate icing, one at a time. This works best when the icing is warm, so if it cools down too much, pop it in the microwave for 20 seconds.
Once you’ve coated a cake cube in chocolate, roll it in the coconut tray so all six sides get a “grassy” coat. Put the finished cubes on the plate.
Repeat steps 11 and 12 for all your cake cubes. Hooray! They are now wombat poo lamingtons!
Eat and enjoy, and don’t forget to stack them like a wombat!
Lamingtons vs the real thing
Just like your lamingtons, wombat poos are cube-like with roughly 2-centimetre-long sides. Unlike your lamingtons, wombats digest nearly all of the grass they eat … so the green coconut you added is just for fun. Did you know that wombats can poo up to 80-100 times per night? How many lamingtons did you make?
A fine specimen of wombat poo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Bjørn Christian Tørrissen
What’s happening?
The common wombat is the only animal on the planet known to make cube-shaped poo! This is weird because their poo doesn’t come out of a square-shaped hole. It turns out that the answer lies in the large intestine, which is the last section of the digestive system. This is where the body takes up liquid, making the poo more firm and solid.
In 2021, a team of engineers and scientists took a closer look at the muscles in a wombat’s large intestine. They discovered that, unlike humans and other animals, wombat large intestines aren’t uniform. Instead, they have alternating sections of soft and stiff tissue that have different stretchy-ness. The team used maths to show that this would, in fact, produce poos with corners!
But why would this fancy large intestine evolve? Our best hypothesis is all about marking territory. In one experiment, scientists discovered that wombats avoided areas with other wombats’ poo. Since wombats tend to be loners, they protect their territory by pooing in obvious places – like on top of rocks and logs. And the cube shape helps the poo stack higher without rolling away!
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