Birthday Cake!

As you may have noticed, I am not a very good blogger. This may be due to the fact that a) I forgot how to post things to the blog and Jon only got around to re-teaching me today or b) my job does not require me to sit in front of a computer all day or c) the fact that I generally far prefer talking to people to writing to them. Draw your own conclusions. In any case, I am trying to turn over a new leaf. I am going to make it easy for myself by focusing today’s post on one of my favorite things: baking! Jon’s birthday was last weekend, but due to circumstances beyond my control, I didn’t get to make him a cake on his actual birthday. These circumstances were that Jon decided that a fun activity for his birthday would be visiting the mountain gorillas at the Volcanoes National Park in Northern Rwanda. In order to see the group of gorillas that Jon was interested in we had to hike 4 hours straight up a (n inactive) volcano and three hours back down. It was pretty amazing, but needless to say, after this everyone was more interested in sleeping than in cake. Here is a picture of me with a gorilla so you can get a sense of how close we were to them. For those of you who are more interested in gorillas than in baking, Jon is going to put up a whole post on our gorilla adventure soon.

So, I decided that yesterday would be cake day. Jon’s preferred birthday cake is funfetti, which to the uninitiated is white cake with confetti melted in so that it has colorful spots throughout. I had asked my mom to bring a funfetti cake mix from the States over Christmas but something was lost in translation and instead she brought funfetti icing. She did manage to bring many other amazing food items including pretzels, gold fish, Kashi granola bars, and all important taco seasoning so I wasn’t too upset (thanks mommy!) And it turns out to have been a blessing in disguise because I learned how to make my own funfetti cake.

I used a white cake recipe that I found on allrecipes.com (I picked it because it only required ingredients that are readily available here), followed the suggestions for modification given by some posters, made some of my own modifications, and voila! my first every from-scratch white cake. In case you are interested in making a white cake or funfetti cake of your own, here is the recipe I used. Also, keep in mind that Kigali is at almost 5,000 feet, so if you’re baking at lower altitude, your cake will probably turn out slightly differently (I’m not sure exactly how it will be different, but I’ve read enough baking books to know that it will be different…so if you try it, let me know)

White Cake for Jon’s Birthday

2 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 ½ cups white sugar
½ cup oil
2 eggs
1 ½ cups milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
(Sprinkles for funfetti cake)

1. Butter and flour a 9x13 pan
2. Preheat oven at 350
3. Sift (mix) together flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. (I don’t have a sifter, so I mixed and it turned out fine)
4. Mix in egg yolks, milk, oil, and vanilla.
5. Beat.
6. Beat egg whites in separate bowl until soft peaks form (I have no electric mixer so I did this by hand. It took a little while but it’s definitely possible).
7. Fold in egg whites (and sprinkles for funfetti cake)
8. Bake at 350 for 30 min

Here is a picture of the cake. The icing looks a little bizarre, but the cake really was delicious. Happy baking!

We have a blog!

It took a little while, but we finally have a blog! Thank you to Jon for conquering the mysteries of the internet and coming up with a witty(?) title. Its a pun...get it? Anyway, I'll write some recap posts in a bit, but for now I'm going to post current news. This weekend we are cat sitting for Jon's boss and enjoying his internet and his beautiful house. His cat, Castro, amazingly looks very very much like Beecher. Sadly though he is very shy and anti-social. One highlight of the house is the collection of cooking magazines. I've been reading Martha Stewart Living and Saveur to my heart's content. I even found an article (with recipes!) about Maida Heatter, whose baking books I love. Last night Nena and Matt came over and we made Mexican-ish food and a chocolate cake for Matt's birthday. The cake was not quite as successful as I had hoped, but given our lack of equipment and ingredients and our inability to regulate the oven temperature, I think it was a pretty good showing. On the agenda for today: a walk to the "Italian Cheese and Harm" shop (that is what the sign outside used to say), where I've never been and an attempt to make pad thai for dinner.