Party in Cerrik! What, what!?

Two of my site mates had birthdays this week, so we decided to host a party. The party itself didn’t actually differ that much from what we do every day. . . hanging out in the internet café, except that this time we had friends. About half of the other trainees came out for a drink. Also we had cake- well sort of.

Courtney and I decided that we wanted to try to bake a cake for the party. We discovered several challenges to baking here:
Unsure about ingredients- I think that this is baking powder, does this look like baking powder? Does anyone know the word for baking powder?
Ingredients not available- powdered sugar, brown sugar, vanilla etc. You may be able to get them somewhere, but I sure haven’t seen them and don’t know how to ask for them.
The oven is in Celsius and not so reliable . . .
Living in someone else’s house and using someone else’s kitchen- including only having very large cake pans and no measuring cups (we baked at Courtney’s house and I forgot my measuring cups at my house).

So we baked a cake. I made lemon curd (one of my favorite recipes) for the filling, but the frosting was a disaster. We didn’t have powdered sugar and with regular sugar it was . . . gross. And the cake didn’t really rise. I am going to go ahead and blame it on the baking powder (is this double acting???) and the fact that we didn’t put it in the oven right away. It tasted fine (and the filling was great!) but it was just kind of flat. I plan to try the same recipe again using my own (imported) baking powder, but I think that I will wait until I am in my own kitchen (only 6 more weeks!). I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Anyway, the party was great, the cake was an experiment and tasted good. The party was fun. Happy birthday Courtney and Karen!

U bësh një qind vjeç.-May you live to be 100 years old!