Bill's Birthday Cake

So Bill's birthday was last Monday. Quince and I had the whole day together (Alexander's first day of school) so I thought it would be fun to spend part of the day baking a cake. I emailed my mother to get the recipe for basic yellow layer cake and a simple icing - the cake I grew up with for birthdays. She dug out her cookbooks and recipes and finally found them,and quickly emailed them off to me.

But Bill requested a chocolate cake. So, onto Epicurious - and of course they are mostly complicated because who looks on epicurious for a basic chocolate cake recipe? But I managed to find one that didn't seem too complicated.

So, I made a grocery shopping list and off Quince and I went. Well, under the best of circumstances a shopping trip is more of a production here, partly because grocery stores are often part of a shopping centers, and many shopping centers have pay parking lots. So you get a ticket when you enter, and then after you are all done shopping you pay at a pay station and then use your ticket to get out of the parking lot. All paid parking lots then have parking lot security guys walking around keeping an eye on the cars. For the non-pay parking lots, there are also unofficial parking security guys around, whom you tip when you leave.

But mostly why it is more of a production to shop is that I don't know where anything is in the grocery stores here - and I don't know even if they have what I am looking for. What is great is that the stores have millions of employees around stocking shelves so it isn't hard to find someone to ask. However, that doesn't always work because 7 times out of 10 they can't understand my accent, so they send me off to an aisle across the store, or simply say they are out of stock.

Well, even knowing that I did not budget my time correctly at all. Quince and I spent hours - or what seemed like hours - in the store going up and down aisles and back again. I never did find Bakers chocolate, so I bought chocolate baking discs - a small bag of chocolates the size of a flattened chocolate chip. I found icing sugar - which I hoped was the same as confectioners sugar. No birthday candles. And I had to forego the "crunchy" part of the recipe since I couldn't find any heath bar or equivalant. I found a version of cake pans that looked like they might do the trick.

Home we went with bags loaded down. First task was to print out the recipe. But our printer decides not to work. Okay, so I just take the computer into the kitchen. Pre-heat the oven to 350 degress - except our oven is in celcius. Easy to look up - except we don't have wireless in our kitchen, so take the computer back to the dining room and look up the conversion (in case you need it 350Deg F = 177deg C).

Mix the dry ingredients - oops -turns out that we needed baking soda not baking powder. Back to the dining room with computer to lok up how to substitute using baking powder. Yes, you can, but was advised that it wasn't a very good subsitiuion. The person writing the conversion recommended going back to the store rather than use baking powder, but for the reasons above I was not about to do.

Time to melt the chocolate - little chocolate discs in grams, recipe in ounces So, you guessed it - back to the dining room for another conversion from ounces to grams. Okay, using a barely readable measuring cup I measure out 1/2 cup of water to melt with the chocolate, and have Quince stir. I am no professional, but it looks pretty watery to me. So, I dig up a better measuring cup and pour the watery chocolate into it - oh, I had added one and a half cups of water!! I had used up all the little discs, so what's to be done but turn up the heat and boil it down. At this point I am not very optimistic about this cake, but nothing to do but forge ahead.

Okay, what kind of recipe asks you to butter the pan, then put wax paper on the bottom, and then butter again? I don't know, but I am not taking any chances, so I dutifully follow these insane instructions. Do the final mixing, and realize that there isn't time to actually bake the cake before picking up Alexander from school. I turn off my pre-heated 177deg oven, and load Q into the car.

While at the school, another mom there who is American compliments me for being so brave to bake here so soon after my arrival. She says she hasn't baked yet because we are at high altitude and who knows what that does to baking times. This cake is doomed!!

But not to be deterred, I get home, reheat the oven, pour the batter into the two pans and slide them into the oven. I close the oven door - and it won't close. Turns out two cake pans won't fit on one shelf in our oven - and our oven only has one shelf. It is about 5:15pm - each layer is going to take 35 minutes to cook (or more given that we are at an altitude higher than Denver) and then has to cool before we icing it. But I am this far in, and so I cook them one at a time. Testing them as best I can with a thick skewer. The first one was a bit underdone, but I needed to get the second one in - so I cooked the next one a bit longer till I smelled burning - that was my sign to take it out. I peeled off the damn burnt wax paper and a 1/4 inch layer of cake.

Meanwhile Alexander is instructed to look up to see how many grams one pound of sugar is - it is 450grams in case you're interested. The bag of icing sugar is 500 grams. I can see no reason to save 50grams of icing sugar so I tell Alexander to pour the whole thing in. I can't be bothered to do the math to adjust all the other ingredients - I have given up any illusions of having an edible cake by this point.

So we have a nice dinner - that Bill had to help cook because I was so far behind in the cake process. I put the sad cake together, slather on the still cooling extra sweet icing, turn out the lights and bring out the candeless cake to the table. Bill good naturedly blows out the table candles, cuts and serves the cake.


The upshot - it was good enough for us all to have a piece and finish it - but no one asked for seconds. Hopefully by the time of Alexander's b-day in January I will have figured out a thing or two.