Oh my I am just so filled up on rice and orange soda, I cannot even describe it! Ariel, my friend here in San Juan and kind of roommate now, and I made a cake yesterday for Francisco (the albanil—foreman of the clinic) because today is his birthday. This cake was pretty incredible, and I have some good fotos of the process. We made a carrot cake (well from a box… but we did add in extra carrots) and we had wanted to make it in the solar oven, I just got one and am excited to try it out… but as has been the situation for the last couple weeks now… there was no sun today… not even a little peek of sun through the clouds this morning which we are usually blessed with. I am really ready for the rainy season to be done… everyone keeps telling me that it doesn’t really rain in October, and I am like um well it is October 4th now and this is the rainiest it has been yet. Yesterday I got caught out in the rain and I had these books that I am borrowing from this guy here in town, so I ran to the store and bought a piece of plastic to tie around my neck. Yesterday the whole day I wore this plastic and my big black rainboots. Ariel said that we are starting to look pretty chapin (which means Guatemalan) but not chapina… which is the word for a girl Guatemalan… yes I dress kind of like a man going to work in the fields… they wear these same black boots and always have this piece of plastic tied around their neck covering only their backs. People look at me pretty funny sometimes…. I don’t know how the women always look so put together when they are wading through rivers running down the street that go at least up to mid calf. But yeah sometimes I just have to wear this stuff… I am sick of being soaking wet.
So… we could not cook the cake in the solar oven… and well although cooking a cake on the stove is fun and worked out for Ashley and I, we decided that it would be easier since we had two cakes to cook it in the oven… yes I do actually have a gas oven in my new casita. Ok… so we cooked the cake in the oven… it was a little lopsided, but no not quite like your cherry birthday cake Ashley that we made in Varsity. But yeah… so then we decide that we will take the cake out of the pans and make a little layer cake and be all fancy. So, we decide the burnt up comal that I have to make tortillas is the best surface for the cake. However the cake didn’t want to come out of the pan… so well we had some craters in the cake… Oh but before this, we went to the store to find stuff to make icing. Now the first idea was to buy the little container of Betty Crocker icing which has been sitting on the sheves of the store since I moved here. It moves around the store always on a different shelf.. but it is always there. There used to be another can of frosting, but Ash and I bought that for the stove cake we made… as we were putting it on the cake, we realized that it was about a year expired… but I don’t think anyone got sick:J Ok, so the icing has disappeared off the shelf…did someone buy it? Ok, next plan… we will make our own cream cheese icing! So we find the cream cheese… and from what I can remember powdered sugar is what you use for a cake. So we look at Super Quic the store that sells everything…. Yes pretty much anything… food, school stuff, plastic, tools, paint, computer stuff, toys… but no they are out of glaze sugar (pronounced like glass… took a while to figure this out). So well we decide to pasear around to the other tiendas and the market to look for glaze sugar… and no luck… everyone pretty much laughs at us for thinking that we could find powdered sugar in San Juan. When we ask at one store if anyone would have it… we get this answer “No muy vende aqui in San Juan” that is a new use of the word muy for me…thinking maybe that is not correct but who knows… So yeah well we buy regular sugar which every tienda has PLENTY of…. Sugar is well a staple here. I was buying food for a family here… we are trying to get one of the kids strong enough so that he can go to Spain and have surgery… and I buy corn, beans, rice, oatmeal, milk, this milk supplement drink stuff, salt… and lots of sugar! But yeah, so anyways we have our sugar and cream cheese.
Back to the house to make the icing. So… we decide that to get the granuals out of the sugar we should cook the sugar with water… well this was quite a process… but yeah I guess it somewhat worked, and we added the cream cheese and essence of vanilla…not quite sure what that is for quite a large bottle it costs about 25 cents (US). But yeah, it works out well, but well we don’t have enough to cover the whole cake in layers and such… so how are we going to stretch this icing???… well we added some water and powdered milk and more sugar… and now we have very liquidy icing… so what can we use to thicken it… why not corn flour which we use to make tortillas. So yeah we add some of that and it has a weird tortillaish taste… well we add more of other stuff and end up having an interesting icing which tastes kind of strange but we figured they are used to eating tortillas and corn all the time so well maybe they will like it. So we ice the cake and put the layers on top… and well it looked kind of like a disaster. With craters in the middle pieces falling off the edges and two very different sizes of cakes. How can we make the cake look somewhat edible??? Well we do a bit of surgery try to bring the cake back to its original form… then to fill in the craters we put banana slices on top of the cake and in the craters. Then to make this look a little more natural and presentable, we melt up some chocobanano chocolate… really weird consistency choclatey stuff that they use to make chocolate covered bananas…. And we drizzle this over the cake. Then to top it off, we take these little chocolate chip cookies we found at the store and make an F on the cake for Francisco…. And we cut off a piece of a candle and stick it in the middle. Now here is a Guatemalan birthday cake.
So… next we head over to Francisco and Ana’s house to bring the cake. But before we can sing happy birthday and eat the cake… we have to put on the Guatemala birthday mix CD and set off some fire crackers, meanwhile I made a couple tortillas with Ana… I am getting better at them… but mine still are a little funny shaped and kind of fat. Now we are ready for the cake… so we sing happy birthday, and all eat the cake. So Ariel and I get up to say our goodbyes cause it is about lunch time, and they say no no you are staying to eat lunch with us… oh yes yes we have enough we made lunch for you too. So we get a delicious meal of chicken pepian and rice cooked with carrots and quisquil. And… of course our tortillas. Now whenever I eat there they always give me the hugest portion of food… and then Ana and Julia just eat a little plate of food. And of course here you have to finish all your food. Its really good food…. But it is sooo much. And Ariel doesn’t eat meat so she asked for a plate without chicken and she got the hugest plate of rice I have ever seen! I think that it was seriously a whole bag of rice (a pound) just for her on her plate. It was pretty incredible! And she actually finished it all off…very impressive. I tried… but I just couldn’t finish all the rice… I think I got all the chicken… but its so hard to tell on those bones if you got it all… I know what a special treat it is to have chicken… so I try really hard to get it all… but it’s a struggle… luckily everyone eats with their hands and licks their fingers for napkins so I never have to worry about offending anyone with my bad table manners. But yeah, so both of us now are so incredibly full, but it was very delicious and such an honor for them to invite us to stay for dinner.
