American cake

Not long after we moved to Chartres, June showed me a cake that he wanted me to make. He told me that they bought the cake mix when they were in MN this past summer and asked if I would be willing to make it the next time everyone was over. Of course I agreed and thought it would be a moment of redemption for me after the cheesecake situation.

So I checked the back of the box to see what ingredients were required, the basics of eggs, water, and oil (I was so happy to see instructions in English, ahh it's the little things). I asked if there was a certain type of frosting that they would like for the cake and vanilla frosting was suggested since it was a white cake. So the next trip to the grocery store I had set out to grab a container of frosting for the cake.  At this point, based on my grocery shopping experiences here, I should have had minimal expectations going into to my hunt for frosting. However, I assumed that this would be the same as in the states where you have 50 different kinds of frostings to choose from in the baking aisle. Not the case, I couldn’t even find ONE container of frosting in the baking aisle. It figures that in a country of amazing desserts that all of the baking is done with real ingredients, not pre-made.

So my backup plan was to make frosting from scratch. I turned to one of my BFF’s (best friends forever), Pinterest, and found a couple of options.  I decided on one that required minimal ingredients (butter, powdered sugar, vanilla, and milk). Those ingredients were not too difficult to find other than the powdered sugar I found wasn’t exactly the same as I am used to back home. Thankfully I brought measuring cups with me to be able to bake using recipes from the states so it was pretty smooth sailing from there.

The only other challenge was to convert the oven temperature from Fahrenheit to Celsius. I have an app on my IPhone (which is now really an IPod Touch since it isn’t being used for phone service) that does conversions.

The cake and frosting appeared to have turned out well and got rave reviews from the family. It’s good to know I can still make a box cake mix turn out alright, thanks Betty Crocker!!!