The village celebrates monthly birthdays where all the staff and village get together and eat cake. Great idea, yes? Except, all the professional cake makers were away from the village, so Karleigh and I filled in. High elevation, no recipe, no experience making cake from scratch, no problem! I even found an internet signal from my USB internet on the kitchen counter! Brilliant! We found three recipes to try and jumped right in. Step one, mix ingredients on medium speed. (Uh, Karleigh? Can you beat a little faster, it says "medium" speed!) Beat until light and fluffy.
Meet the new light and fluffy.
Perfect! Now to preheat the oven....
Oh this will help. One of the knobs on the oven is entirely in pictures. Since it's 9pm, we decided not to call anyone and just picked one....And there's no 350 degrees either - only 50, 100, 200, and "Max". Okay. Yes. Good.
First cake is done - it's supposed to be chocolate but it doesn't look very chocolatey. And it seems we may have guessed wrong on the oven settings, because the top is almost black and the middle is only just cooked. We are supposed to dump it out on a cake rack to cool. Couldn't find a cake rack, so we decide to use a cutting board...same difference right? Doesn't matter, the cake splits itself in half and the top falls onto our cutting board while the bottom stays in the pan. (yes, we greased and floured the pan like the recipe instructed!) The score is- Oven: 1 Karleigh and Rachel: 0
Despite the fact that it doesn't look like cake, it tastes great, except for the black parts on top. And we now realize that it isn't as chocolatey because we only put in 4 teaspoons of cocoa, instead of 4 tablespoons. We can fix this. Try try again!
While the oven was busy eating cake number 1, we had already mixed up the batter for cake number 2 - chai cake. It calls for the same spices used to make Kenya chai tea and uses brewed tea in the frosting! Smelled really good. We put it in the oven at a lower temperature. After about 30 minutes, that didn't seem to be working well so we randomly changed some oven settings. And then I went to another house to look for more eggs, flour, and sugar...successfully returning with eggs, a little bit of flour, and a LOT of icing sugar. If all else fails, we can just serve frosting!
Next cake is simple white cake. And yes, we separated the eggs to add only egg whites so we would actually have WHITE cake! It looked so beautiful before we put it into the cake-eating oven monster in the corner. The chai cake came out somewhat marginal. We are hoping if we just leave it in the pan and make a really awesome icing, it will be edible. So the score is now - Oven: 1 Rachel and Karleigh: 1
In goes the white cake. We lowered the temperature again and picked a new picture for knob number two. And then anxiously watched it to see what will happen. And then got even more anxious.
Now this is definitely a sign of serious progress being made!
We are slightly concerned about our dwindling supply of flour. At this point, we decide to call Ruth who is at the Nairobi Airport trying to leave Kenya (and we MISS you so much still). She enlightens us that we have chosen the wrong picture for oven knob number 2 and NOW we have the oven set correctly. Mostly. I think.
Success! Isn't it beautiful! It actually looks like cake! And we are doing even better now that we scrapped the idea of dumping out the cakes to cool. The score is now - Oven:1 Karleigh and Rachel: 2!
Now that I'm looking at the photos, it appears that Karleigh did all the physical work, and I just surfed the internet and played kitchen paparazzi. Typical.
What the kitchen looked like when we finally finished. Ha! Just kidding. Miraculously, we did end up with 4 iced cakes for the bonfire celebration!
So beautiful! Turned out the chai cake was actually pretty wet on the bottom (we are still counting it as a win!) but luckily it was really dark when we served it. The kids liked that one best! We had some chocolate cake left over - breakfast tomorrow!
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Me and Ruth at the bonfire. =)
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