A Farm for Chocolate Cakes

Over at Liber Parma "Ria" proposes an interesting puzzle:

Where on earth might a farm be situated so as to be able to have available all the ingredients to make a chocolate cake?

This gives rise to a large number of interesting questions about the recipe, the required ingredients and tools, cimate, growing conditions, and so on.

I have already commented on it on "Ria's" blogg; but I have a little more to add about the puzzle in itself.

This puzzle is a wonderful thing to ponder. It reminds me of Robinson Crusoe, or the Swiss Family Robinson, or the Danny Dunn story about living on a desert island.

All Chestertonians know GKC's answer to the question "What book would you want on a desert island?" is "Thomas's Guide to Practical Shipbuilding". But not everyone remembers GKC's discussion in Orthodoxy:

Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the bookcase, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island.
[GKC, Orthodoxy CW1:267]

It deserves serious consideration not only for itself, but for what it implies (see his next paragraph for details!)

GKC also has a great story in CW14 called "My Uncle the Professor" in which he tells the story (from a nine-year-old viewpoint) of how his "uncle" and he went to live in a tree. You will really enjoy it.

Finally, I will mention a famous science fiction story called Spacehounds of IPC by the exceedingly famous E. E. "Doc" Smith in which the hero has to build a high-tech device almost "from scratch".