Bountiful Baking

Well, today was my roommate, Jerri K's, 25th birthday. To help her celebrate, I decided to make a home-made (from scratch) red velvet cake with buttercream icing (a Gifford family birthday tradition). It is this endeavor which provided the inspiration for today's blog....

I have determined that it is very, very difficult to appreciate cooking in one's native country until one attempts to cook in a non-native country! That being said, I would also like to make the disclaimer that I do realize how very fortunate I am to be in a country that hosts so many different cultures--I am sure it is EXPONENTIALLY easier to find American staples here than it would be in many places, so please do not consider any of this a complaint...just a comparison of what I've been accustomed to with what I'm growing accustomed to!

I'm sure that I have already mentioned that grocery shopping here is always an adventure because you never know what you will find (if I haven't mentioned it, my apologies...grocery shopping here is always an adventure because you never know what you will find...there, now you know*.)! Also, you never know what kinds of products you will find at the different stores...even stores in the same chain may not (and probably don't) carry all the same things. It is always somewhat of a gamble trying to find specific things that may or may not be "uncommon" items. Root beer is an excellent example of this! Jerri K once went to 3 or 4 different grocery stores looking for it, and we ended up finding at a small corner grocery store--she hopped out of the car at the red light to run into the store and get some (then walked down the street half a block to where we were rendezvousing with some friends). Anyways, I digress....

The point is that I was a bit concerned about finding all the ingredients for the cake...flour, sugar, baking soda, milk, eggs, salt...these are all easy to come by (although the sugar granules are HUGE!)...cocoa powder wasn't a problem (yay!), vanilla I had found at another grocery store a few weeks ago, stick butter we had (although the "sticks" are shaped differently than they are in America...more like blocks) which was good, because I couldn't find it today (probably wasn't looking in the right place, the organization in this store [Carrefour...one of the three grocery stores we frequent...and my least favorite by far!] makes very little sense to me), vinegar** and Crisco I had borrowed from Brooke (no idea where she got those from!), and I finally gave up on buttermilk and opted to make my own substitute (milk plus lemon juice or white vinegar). 

So, by the time I had all the ingredients together, the most difficult part was over...I could turn my music on in the kitchen and bake my merry little heart out...it was GLORIOUS!...until I actually went to bake the cakes...two 9-inch cake pans will not both fit into our oven...sigh. I ended up baking one in our oven and the other in Brooke's oven (yes, I do realize that I could have baked them one at a time, but I wasn't really prepared to devote that kind of time to this project...even though that's about what ended up happening!). Our oven also does not come with a temperature regulator...so it's really a bit of trial and error to bake anything in it. The cake in Brooke's oven (temperature regulated) turned out picture perfect...the cake in our oven...well...it tasted good, but was rather tough and dark on the bottom (like cake jerky!). However, this is not a sad story...the four-layer cake very quickly became a three-layer cake with artistic cake crumbles placed on the sides to decorate the icing! The extra icing was combined with some more red food coloring and used to decorate the top of the cake!

I'm happy to report that the cake was a success (Alex was kind enough to find some candles for us in the "gift drawer")--it was happily complemented by some Blue Bell ice cream (Jerri K is a HUGE fan and Carrefour had several flavors to choose from...including two of her favorites: Strawberry and Mint Chocolate Chip!)--and the birthday was a good one!

*So, for any of you reading these blogs, you will likely have noticed that I'm rather easily side-tracked and extremely fond of including all my asides in the narrative, however, I decided this particular side-track was just a bit too long to include above (but was, of course, certain I would forget it if I did not include it here...so here it is!)...a few examples of the "randomness" one can find at the local grocery (and by "randomness", I, of course, mean "strange things to find in America, normal things to find not in America")....

Found these a month or so ago..."Lamb Franks"...I have not yet worked up the courage to try these...don't know if I ever will...I'm just now deciding that I like lamb shawarmas and lamb kebabs...lamb franks is a bit of a stretch, I think....

Today's discovery..."Coffee Whitener"...right next to all the coffee creamers. I'm a tad curious if this actually does anything to the flavor or truly just changes the shade of the coffee. On my list of things to try someday....

**Semi-funny story: Brooke found the apple cider vinegar for me in her pantry, no problem. She then proceeded to offer me the other types of vinegar she had on hand...malt vinegar and fig vinegar. When I went back later to see if she had some white vinegar (so I could make the buttermilk), she didn't have any...! The moral of the story? You know you live in a foreign country when you can find FIG vinegar in the pantry, but not white vinegar!!!