When Rose McAdoo got back to New York after spending several months working as a sous chef in Antarctica, her friends had questions. Are there penguins? How do you get supplies? Are you, like, on an iceberg?

McAdoo set about answering their questions the best way she knows how: with cake.

“Cake is my canvas,” she says. “It’s my way of making big ideas literally digestible.”

The result was a series of descriptive desserts McAdoo developed to tell the story of life and work at McMurdo Station, a U.S.-run research station in Antarctica. She’s says she chose projects that showcase the diversity of the research that’s happening on the continent. She is now releasing photographs of the cakes, and the stories and science behind them, on her Instagram page.

“There’s people shooting laser beams into the upper atmosphere, people putting tracking devices on seals, people digging for fish bones in the desert,” she says. “There’s things out there that I didn’t even know existed, that people have dedicated their lives to studying,” she says.

Antarctic Research Takes The Cake In These Science-Inspired Confections

Photos: Courtesy of Rose McAdoo and Kira Morris