Having Cake and Eating It Too

Freshly Washed Measuring Cups and Spoons

After learning the stove ignition, I've been pushing myself a little more in the kitchen but it's sometimes tiring to take a US standard units recipe and convert it to the metric system.  (The conversion itself is not actually the challenge, rather the ability to measure it.)*  So my goal last November was to return with measuring cups and spoons.  

Since then I've been thinking quite a bit about the way I measure.

I hit a milestone the second day this year when I guided a taxi driver from the airport to home and in this 45 minute journey with direction and random conversation, he did not ask that perennial question:  "De donde sos?"  A first.  A relief.

There have been other milestones, measures, that I've been moving forward on paper.  Photos and meetings, and numbers assigned and all the while, I'm learning.

It is quite a different sort of feeling in that in every day, there is guaranteed to be something new.  Perhaps this was one reason I was keen to make something old and familiar.

I converted my typical 8x8" and 9x9" go-to pans to centimeters so I could go in search for a pan.  There were three possibilities and my Spanish is still not to the depth to understand the specific details of metal fabrication for comparison when the sales clerk explains them.  I understood enough to select and he didn't ask me "the question" which was as perfect of an experience that I could have in a store right now.  I think the pan is aluminum.

Saturday afternoon chocolate cake.  

I was alone so any cake failings could be whisked away sans evidence.  Not knowing the exact temperature of the stove,  I sat beside it in the afternoon sun, glistening while waiting for an odor of chocolate that would signal I was safe to open the oven with low risk of a falling cake.  I took a series of photos along the way as I'm prone to do these days, marking another milestone.  

After 35 long minutes and multiple timers, I had a cake.  The cocoa powder was also an experiment because there was only one option available.  The look on the owners face was not reassuring when I said I would use it to make a cake.  I really had no idea how it would taste.  

Making the icing was an adventure sans mixer.  A hand blender doesn't really do the trick but after laboring twenty minutes, it was deemed good enough and the kitchen was covered with light sugar so lingering marks for an earnest effort.  

The cake lasted three days.  

*I'm an engineer so of course it's possible with a scale and other items that I could do it, but who wants to go through all that effort on a Saturday evening for cake?