The art and skill of baking remains a fundamental part of the human experience. Nearly every known culture has developed baking techniques at one point in its history; the hypothesized reason being that baking is an efficient and effective from of nutrition, as baked goods, especially breads, are a common and economic food.
Baking is a food cooking method that uses prolonged dry heat by convection, rather than by thermal radiation, normally in an oven, but also in hot ashes, or on hot stones. The most commonly baked item is bread but many other types of foods are baked. Baking generally involves heat being gradually transferred from the surface of a baking medium to its interior. As heat travels through the baking medium, it transforms the baking medium, e.g., batter and dough, into comestible baked product. Typically, baked goods have a firm dry crust and a softer center.
Beyond its nutritional value, baking has become an art form in more modern times. Today, baked goods are sometimes judged by their aesthetics rather than their nutritional value, e.g., wedding cakes, shaped cookies and designer cupcakes. Creating aesthetically pleasing baked goods often times involves sculpting a baked good from a starting block. This process can be quite difficult because fully cooked baking goods are not readily able to retain fine details. This may be the result of the baked good crumbling or having too many pockets of air. On the other hand, if the baked good is readily able to retain the fine detail from sculpting then the baked good may not be worth eating.
Because of the above-described dilemma, there have been many different prior art inventions that have attempted to provide a shape to a baked good during the baking process. These prior art inventions generally involve the use of molds or casts; the molds and casts are shaped in a certain way such that the final baked good retains the shape of the mold or cast.
Unfortunately, a thorough analysis of the prior art reveals that previously invented systems and methods for producing shaped comestible baked products suffer from a variety of limitations. First, most of these prior art inventions are intended for relatively simple shapes, e.g., hearts, stars, horse shoes, clovers, half moons, rainbows, balloons. Second, in most instances the shape is limited to one half of the baked good, e.g. bundt cake molds and casts. Third, for those prior art inventions that attempt to give a shape to the second half, the system and method attempts to leverage the inherent property of baking medium rising during the baking process; however, if too little baking medium is employed than there is insufficient force from the rising baking medium to drive the baking medium into the shaped grooves and recesses of the second half of the shaped mold or cast, if too much baking medium is employed than there is too much force from the rising baking medium and this may cause egression of the baking medium out of the seams of the two sided baking mold. As a result, prior art systems and methods for producing shaped comestible baked products rarely result in a final product that takes full advantage of the detail in the mold or cast. For those rare instances that do work, the shaped comestible baked product is incapable of being a complex shape, e.g., a figurine, an abstract caricature, a representative life-like object.
As such, what is needed in the art is a system and method for producing a comestible baked product in complex shapes using cast molding that does not suffer, or at least takes advantage, of the issues described above.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds