The Hubble Space Telescope has produced some pretty amazing pictures of Jupiter in its time. So has the Galileo Space Craft, and a bunch of other probes. But in their way, these pictures beat them all.
Because none of the others were made of sponge.
This remarkable cake is a structurally correct model of the largest planet in the solar system, created by the masterminds at Cake Crumbs.
The spherical cake features everything you'd expect on its surface, including the Great Red Spot - Jupiter's anticyclonic storm which alone is three times the size of Earth.
CakeCrumbs write that they made the gaseous atmosphere of the planet with ivory marshmallow fondant, and then added the details with edible inks:
I detailed the atmosphere of Jupiter by covering the cake with ivory marshmallow fondant, then dry brushing a combination of ivory, brown and maroon edible ink. The top ended up being a bit more saturated as I was largely experimenting with colours at that point and was throwing in a bit of yellow. I ended up sticking mostly with ivory and adding extra detail with the brown. Once all the base colours were down I started removing colour to create the storms or other distinguishing features and topping it off with highlights. The whole process took about 8 hours with teeny tiny brushes.
And then there's the inside. Obviously no one has been inside the actual core of Jupiter, which is tremendously dense but thought to be made of rock and ice, surrounded by liquid metallic hydrogen and finally molecular hydrogen gas. The cake isn't to scale, but it doesn't matter - it's pretty accurate, and also tasty:
In cake speak, this translates to a core made of mudcake, surrounded by almond butter cake, surrounded by a tinted vanilla Madeira sponge. There's a crumb coat of vanilla buttercream underneath the fondant.
If you want to follow the recipe, the tutorial is here. More pictures below.