Finding the Cake Dataset’s Original Source

Rasmus Baath has done a good deed for all:

In statistics, there are a number of classic datasets that pop up in examples, tutorials, etc. There’s the infamous iris dataset (just type iris in your nearest R prompt), the Palmer penguins (the modern iris replacement), the titanic dataset(s) (I hope you’re not a guy in 3rd class!), etc. While looking for a dataset to illustrate a simple hierarchical model I stumbled upon another one: The cake dataset in the lme4 package which is described as containing “data on the breakage angle of chocolate cakes made with three different recipes and baked at six different temperatures [as] presented in Cook (1938)¹”. For me, this raised a lot of questions: Why measure the breakage angle of chocolate cakes? Why was this data collected? And what were the recipes?

Read on as Rasmus unravels the mysteries of the cake dataset with the help of several others. H/T R-Bloggers.