Sometimes I think of how cakes are a miracle.

Take a pound cake. It's made of equal amounts (one pound each) of four ingredients.

Sounds simple, right?

To get the first ingredient, you need to find some species of grass that grows in the Middle East.

When the grass is ripe and golden, you harvest the grains. Then you grind them to get a fine powder. You remove the darker parts of the powder to just keep the white.

That was the easiest ingredient. You'll need another plant: a large grass that grows in tropical areas.

The part you need is some sweet juice in the stalks. After a lot of labor-intensive processing and refining, you turn this juice into thousands of tiny white crystals.

You're not done yet. For your next ordeal, you must hunt this flightless bird from the jungles of Asia. Don't kill it though. Just take the weird round things the females lay.

Crack the weird round thing open: it's slimy and fat and bright yellow. That's exactly what you want.

The last one's tough. You need the female of this massive (but peaceful) beast. You need it to have just given birth. You need to take the white liquid it wanted to give its baby.

Then you need to extract the fat from that liquid, and mix it until it becomes a yellowish solid.

Now combine these four things in a very specific order before you apply a very specific amount of heat for a very specific amount of time, and you have a pound cake!

Maybe you'd like to add something for flavor?

Perhaps the tiny fragrant seeds of an expensive orchid?

Or the bitter processed fat from a Central American fruit?

Or the dried bark of some tree in India?

Maybe we shouldn't get too fancy...

The reason cakes exist, of course, is that we had centuries to domesticate plants and animals, and to create culinary innovations.

Complex things can come into being, with time and mechanisms like culture or natural selection.

But make no mistake: cakes are a miracle.