Content Management System Cake, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

This weekend Clarkson and I decided to build a cake based on the Google Analytics dashboard. It was a fairly complex construction that ended up taking a lot longer than I expected. It was based around a Waitrose Lemon Drizzle cake recipe, with lemon butter icing filling. I actually had to bake three separate cakes. One for each layer of the main body of the cake and another to use for the 3D elements on the top.

The cake contained a number of the most important elements of a typical dashboard, and also ones that are tastiest to eat. I included a bounce rate chart, traffic sources pie chart, page views vs unique visits motion chart and the following top content area bar chart…

Here are all the ingredients I used including a whole host of various icing and cake decorating products. Not quite sure why anyone would actually make icing given how cheap the ready rolled stuff is. The coloured icing was extra good, because you could mic it together to create other colours. I also had a whole host of icing brushes, pens and coloured tubes for the more detailed bits. Probably the best accessory of all was the sugared letters, which slightly unbelievable contained Kiwi. Although I think the makers, Dr Oetker is imagining things.

The cake making process was relatively uneventful, although using an electric whisk while mixing the butter and sugar was definitely the messiest way to get things done. I somehow managed to lift the whisk out of the bowl and accidentally sped the thing up, throwing nodules of buttery sugar all over the kitchen like some kind of fatty explosion. Another component of the cake was the “Google Analytics” title. This was created with gingerbread, which is the quickest and easiest way to create biscuitty stuff ever probably. I luckily have every type of biscuit cutter imaginable including the whole alphabet, so it was relatively easy to create the letters. Or at least it was once I realised that letters cook much quicker than normal biscuits so I got a few burnt ones.

So all in all a successful weekend of baking. Hopefully it all gets eaten when I take it all into work tomorrow. On reflection, I wondered if it would have been better to have based the cake on a dashboard created in excel from an export of Omniture data, but with all the various problems this week I decided it was best to base my design on the easiest option. Maybe a ClickMap cake can be the next project?

UPDATE - Who says cakes are not a great way to meet analytics evangelists? Not me….

FURTHER UPDATE - See what a spot on Google’s Analytics blog is worth here.