Safety: Use clean hands and equipment. You don’t need to use peanuts. If you’re making this for someone with a peanut allergy, use more snakes instead of peanuts.
Is a dish full of marshmallows really full? This yummy recipe shows that there’s still heaps of space in a ‘full’ dish.
Mathematicians and scientists need to know how tightly packed things are. The number they use to measure this is known as the packing density. Packing density measures the proportion of the container that’s actually filled with stuff, rather than gaps. Solid rock has a packing density of 1 because it has no gaps. Lightly packed peanuts might have a packing density of ½, meaning 1 cup would contain ½ cup of solid peanut, and ½ cup of air.
Packing density depends on the shapes you’re packing and how they are arranged, but it doesn’t really depend on the size of the shapes – which means that peanuts pack about as well as rice bubbles. There are more gaps between the rice bubbles, but the gaps between the peanuts are much larger.
One way to increase packing density is to use a mixture of different sized objects. The smaller peanuts help fill the gaps between the bigger marshmallows. Of course in this recipe, there’s still plenty of space for the chocolate!
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15 May, 2018 at 4:41 pm
it`s so entertaining
15 May, 2018 at 5:10 pm
Hi Laura,
Glad you liked it! this is definitely the most popular recipe I’ve made. I find people are a lot more fond of maths when it involves chocolate!
Cheers,
David
1 June, 2019 at 11:01 am
Is it like rocky road?
1 June, 2019 at 2:28 pm
Yup!