Bake fail

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

or

Jajajajajajajajajajajajajajajajajajajajajajajajajaja!

Can´t stop laughing about it! This week is the week of my first official monstrous baking failure. What happened? I tried to make a cake in Erasmus-student-kind-of-kitchen-conditions and it has proven to be a mission impossible. I started taking pictures because I thought it was actually funny, but I did not know I was going to photograph a war scenario...

I knew from the very beginning it could go bad, but never thought it was going to turn out this bad... First of all the kitchen of my shared flat is not equipped for the needs of a passionate pastry chef ;) It does not have adequate bowls, a spatula, a whisk, a scale, let´s not even mention an electric mixer... Whilst dreaming of my Kitchen Aid and of a soft and warm cake I decided to try anyways and I dragged into this moment of excitement also my flat mate Gabriela.

We started by "measuring" the quantities with an 250 gr. Nocilla glass; who knows what went wrong here... We continued by mixing all ingredients in a cracked, Chinese dragon bowl and as you can imagine eliminating all flour lumps with just a fork was kind of hard. In the absence of a real sifter, the best idea I had was to use the colander and this worked actually quite well.

Then the question was: how do we beat the egg whites? Well our grandmothers did not have electric whisks and they managed, so will we (we thought)! Actually Gabriela did a pretty good job with those. After the first 5 minutes of beating - with a fork! Remember we have no whisk! - she lost the sensibility of her arm and she managed to just keep going and going till the egg whites were pretty stiff.

Surprisingly enough there was/is a Pyrex dish which made me hopeful or actually confident in the good result of the whole operation...

Last but not least, the hint that should have made me realise this was never going to work is....... this amazingly professional oven that of course every baker uses..... to warm up croissants maybe, not for cakes :( hahahaha! Well you can just imagine the result. The cake did not grow of an inch, it got burned on the bottom and on the top, whilst the core remained liquid; not edible at all. As much as I hate to throw away food, this cake headed to bin right away, I was so disappointed that I did not even take a picture to show you.

I miss my oven, mixer, appliances, my 1000 cookie cutters, my shaped moulds, my muffin paper cases, my coloured sprinkles, my 10kg of flour kept in the freezer, everything. I am starting to feel the withdrawal symptoms. I need to bake!

Have a laugh, better recipes will be up soon

Martina