Cake Catastrophe a la Martha

Martha is quite a character. She is very pretty and very persistent, so she usually gets her way once she sets her mind to it. Though half the time she is poking fun at me in Urdu and leading the other girls in falling over themselves laughing, Martha has been my most consistent companion while I am at Pat and Paul’s house. Martha is about 14 and has a full yet slim figure and facial features similar to Catherine Zeta Jones. However, because of her relatively dark skin tone, she is not considered beautiful by local standards. For myself, I can’t see how anyone can resist the charm of her twinkling smile and doe-eyed pouting. Still, despite her feminine whiles, she was the main cause of the trouble we had when we tried to bake a cake.

It all started when Pat asked me and Jodie to bake a cake to bring with us to the English Worship potluck. Pat was busy with other things and so wasn’t able to supervise much. Pat gave us a recipe for chocolate cake that involved combining butter, water, and cocoa powder until it boiled on the stove, then mixing it in with flower, sugar, eggs, vanilla etc. It seemed simple enough.

Jodie and I both assured Pat that we would be fine. Neither of us realized that we were both counting on the OTHER one to know what to do! I knew that I was no wis in the kitchen but I didn’t think this would be a problem. Even if competent Jodie was a little young or small to know everything, the four other girls who were helping us, Martha included, would surely know what to do; they had been helping their mothers with cooking for years! This assumption seemed validated when Jodie was able to direct me in the way that is best to measure butter. Jodie showed me that by floating the solid butter in a measuring cup of water, one can compensate for air-pockets by measuring density, or something like that.

First, I told Martha to put “doh” (two) cups of water on to boil over the gas stove. Then, while Jodie was rummaging in the fridge to find the butter, I sent Martha to fetch two more cups for measuring the butter. That is when the first problems began. When Jodie was all ready to start scooping butter into a measuring cup of water, I turned around to see where Martha had gotten to. She was standing smilingly right behind me, her hands empty of the requested water. “Caw pani hey? (where is the water)” I asked. Her smile was replaced with a look of confusion. She pointed to the stove. Looking in the pot, I saw she had added the second two cups to the simmering pot. Hastily, I poured the two cups back into the measuring cup and handed it to Jodie.

While Jodie was dumping butter into the water, little by little the waterline rising to the four cup mark, I cast about for something for Martha and the other girls to do. I set them to scooping cocoa powder into the boiling water. “We need cheh (six) tablespoons” I said, indicating the number with my fingers. Eagerly, Martha took the bag from me, loaded up a heaping spoon full, and advanced on the pot. “No!” I stopped her, pulling her back. “Like this,” I said, showing her how to level off the powder in the spoon to make exactly a tablespoon. “Ahh,” she responded, with a knowing look. I kept careful watch and careful count as she and the other girls took turns measuring out the powder, occasionally missing the pot and dumping half the spoon full on the stove. Exasperated, I left them to stir in the cocoa to the water and turned back to Jodie who had finished measuring butter.

This is when the first real hurdle became evident. “This never happened before,” Jodie said, indicating the measuring cup. The butter had melted into the hot water used for measuring. Now we were stuck. We had used most of the cocoa powder getting six tablespoons into the two cups of water on the stove. We had used ALL of the butter, melting it into two cups of water in the measuring cup. But how were we to combine the butter and cocoa without having FOUR coups of water? It was like a brain teaser and made me wish Carlos was there to find a brilliant solution. We ended up calling in Pat. When she heard the story and saw the situation she laughed. “Pour out as much water as you can through a sieve and put the rest in the pot. You’ll get most of it that way.”

So we continued to work. The butter, water, and cocoa mixture had to be continually stirred to keep it from burning. Martha insisted that she would take care of this job while I saw to the preparation of the dry ingredients. With misgiving, I left her to it and turned to the other girls who were sifting flour into a big pan on the floor. After sifting the flour, we discovered that the sugar jar was alive with 10-15 tiny ants. I considered this a problem, but the other girls cheerfully waved away my fears saying that this sort of thing was not unusual. I ruefully watched them measured out cups of bespeckled sugar into the bowl with the flour and other ingredients.

That was when Martha made a squeaking noise that drew my attention back to her and to the simmering pot. She tipped the pot to the side to show me that white things were floating in the dark brown goop. Then she held up the spatula she had been stirring with. The white rubber tip had melted into the pot! Again Pat was called, again we were instructed to run the thick conglomeration through the sieve. Again I watched sheepishly while Pat laughed and threw her hands up, wondering what we would do next.

Pat stayed with us, supervising the remaining steps of the cake catastrophe, until we had the two pans safely in the oven. All went fairly well after that, except for a slight incident when one pan fell off the rack and to the back of the oven while I was trying to switch the front pan to the back. Despite this set back, the cakes both came out of the oven 30 minutes later in pristine condition. I was glad that the trial was successfully over. The girls had gone home and all was relatively quiet.

20 minutes before we had to leave for the pot-luck Pat was hurriedly cooking roties (tortillas) one by one in a frying pan. Pat asked me to make frosting for the cake. “Are we sure it needs it,” I asked anxiously. “My family never frosts our cakes.”

She looked at me skeptically. “We could leave the frosting off one of them, if you’re worried about the sugar.”

“Oh no, I’m just thinking of what would be a best use of our time…” I spluttered.

“Well, I think that the people at the meeting would enjoy icing, and it shouldn’t take too long. It just takes butter, sugar, and cocoa, right?” She said, checking the recipe.

Warily, I assented. “I’m willing to give it a try.”

I promise you, I followed that recipe to a tea. I combined butter and cocoa powder in a saucepan over low heat. I stirred with a wooden spoon to avoid another meltdown. I stirred and stirred as the butter boiled, at which point I turned off the flame. Stirring anxiously, I found that the cocoa powder simply would not combine with the butter. As the foaming bubbles died down, cocoa mud swam resolutely in yellow oil, all that was left of the ill-fated butter. I found myself making a squeaking sound very similar to the one Martha had made as she bent over the same sauce pan earlier that day. Helplessly, I called Pat to examine the concoction.

Pat shook her head and laughed. “Well, we don’t have enough butter or cocoa to start over. Maybe we will have cake without icing after all!”

“There must be a way,” I wheedled, prodding with my spoon at the thick brown muck in the pan, “it has such good ingredients, it seems a shame to throw it away. Maybe if we add just a little sugar or, or something, then maybe it would make a pudding or, or something else that might be tasty?”

“We could try,” she said, “but let’s just take a little bit out of the pan to play with so that we don’t waste all our sugar.”

I scooped a tablespoon’s worth of brown muck into a bowl. Pat stirred in a quarter of a cup of powdered sugar. I watched anxiously as Pat popped a finger-full into her mouth. “Not bad!” She finally reported. Smiling at last, I tried it myself. Not bad indeed.

I poured the oil that had refused to bond with the cocoa into a jar while Pat stirred several cups of sugar into the rest of the cocoa goop in the pan. “This oil must have come out of the butter when it boiled,” I surmised.

“The butter boiled?” Pat asked, surprised. Then she laughed again. “It was only supposed to simmer. Well, tonight we will have low-fat icing.”

Considering all the near disasters, the ants, the rubber, the removed oil etc. all things considered, the cake was a smash hit. Though it was a little chewy, it tasted very good. When Paul heard about the two uncalled for ingredients, ants and the rubber spatula, he was much more concerned about the rubber which might still be in the cake. The ants didn’t bother him at all; as the girls had said, bugs in the food is par for the course here. “Well,” I told him cheerfully, “if you feel any lumps in your cake, you can just tell yourself it is an ant.”