The peanut butter cup, that flared chocolate-covered slice of creamy nuttiness, can pop right into your mouth. Not if it weighs 444 pounds, though! That’s the size of the world’s biggest ever peanut butter cup, made at the Candy Factory in Los Angeles, CA. The candy makers had to use an 8-foot-wide kiddie pool as the bowl. As we see in this video, they poured gallon after gallon of melted chocolate to line it, then shoveled in giant wads of sugary peanut butter mix. They counted the pounds of each ingredient to use 2/5 as much peanut butter as chocolate — exactly the same as the ones we eat. We just hope no one dove in for a swim.
Wee ones: If you smear a layer of melted chocolate, then a layer of peanut butter, then a top layer of chocolate, how many layers does your giant candy cup have?
Little kids: If the factory poured 9 buckets of melted chocolate for the bottom and 1 more than that for the top, how many buckets of chocolate did the top get? Bonus: How many yummy buckets of chocolate did they use in total?
Big kids: If they’ve already dumped 400 out of 444 pounds of ingredients into the pool, how many more pounds do they have left to pour? Bonus: If you wanted to make a whole bunch of 2-pound peanut butter cups with those 444 pounds of ingredients, how many could you make?
The sky’s the limit: If the amount of peanut butter is 2/5 the amount of chocolate, what fraction of the whole peanut butter cup is the peanut butter?
Answers:
Wee ones: 3 layers of ingredients.
Little kids: 10 buckets. Bonus: 19 buckets.
Big kids: 44 pounds. Bonus: 222 candy cups.
The sky’s the limit: It’s 2/7 of the total. If there are 2/5 pound of peanut butter for every pound of chocolate, then we have 2/5 + 5/5 = 7/5 pounds total. 2/5 is 2/7 of 7/5. If you think of each fifth as a chunk, 2/5 will count as 2 of the 7 chunks.