Welcome Home!

Today Jacquelyn and Lucas were discharged from the hospital. To welcome them "home" (or rather, to the house we're staying at this week in Beijing), Anna and I decided to bake them a cake.

Simple, enough, right?

Here's about how the next hour went. True thought process.

I brought a gluten free chocolate cake mix with me from Qingdao, I bet we can make that. Hm...I forgot to check the other ingredients this cake mix needed--guess we'll have to do without lemon juice and vanilla. Hm, don't think we need the whole cake, and these mixes are a bit expensive, so we'll just make a half batch. Ooh, wait, we don't have measuring cups. Guess we'll just have to guess about half. That looks about right. Oops, we don't have butter either. Oh, well we have oil. Just add a little less oil than it calls for butter. Oh, wait, we do have butter. Oh, well. Too late. No beater, so I'll just have Anna stir it for a REALLY long time. Keep stirring Anna! I'm still washing the dishes. Okay, ready to put it in. Wait, forgot to start the oven. How many degrees Celsius is 350 degrees Fahrenheit? Quick, look that up on line. Okay, about 175 Celsius. Wait, I don't have a pan. Hm, this is a real problem. (Sorting through kitchen) Ah ha! Maybe this will work. Sure, it's really for a toaster oven. And it's only about five inches by eight, by one. Guess we'll have to make two small cakes. Here we go. That looks about enough for the first one. Man, the oven is taking forever to heat up! Maybe this indicator light doesn't really work. It's been about a half hour, should be long enough. Here we go. Hm, how long does a five inch by eight inch by one inch take to cook? We'll just see how it goes.

(15 Minutes later)

Well, that doesn't look exactly right, but hopefully it's tasty! Welcome home didi!

From Lucas Carman

I'm not sure where the weird bumps and holes came from. Maybe from the lack of lemon juice and vanilla or "approximate" proportions, maybe from the wrong temperature, maybe from the use of oil instead of butter, could be the funny pan, or even the cooking length! Oh, well, it's the thought that counts. And, by the way, it was quite tasty. Even Jeremy said so, and he's not used to gluten free foods!