In my six months living in Korea I’ve figured out how to take care of the basics: grocery shopping, dry cleaning, finding a gym, getting from one part of the city to the other. Other seemingly simple endeavors can become extremely complex, particularly if I’m anticipating that they'll be simple. A case in point is my pursuit of a home-baked chocolate cake, complete with chocolate icing. Jessica’s only birthday request this year was a big piece of fluffy, chocolate cake. You can find “chocolate cake” in Korea, but it never tastes the way you expect it to. Your mouth waters as you gaze at the slices just beyond a bakery's glass case, but once you fork over the exorbitant price and take the first bite, you realize it’s either too airy, not sweet enough, or possesses some other quality that leaves you thinking, “I just ate 200 calories for
nothing.” So, the first task of my mission was to get my hands on a cake mix from the States. Thankfully, this hurricane was borne of an even stronger and more determined force: Paula Rhodes (a.k.a. Mom). Empathetic to the sweet tooth of strangers far and wide, Mom immediately jumped to the task and located a light-weight cake mix and corresponding icing mix and mailed them to Korea weeks ahead of Jessica's big day. That’s when I had to step up and see this plan through to completion, which meant finding a cake pan and candles (I figured out where to find eggs and butter sometime during week two in Korea). Who knew a cake pan would be so hard to come by? In fact, who knew no one in the wider Gwangmyeong City area even sells a standard 9x13 pan (or however that converts to centimeters). I started to wonder if the slices of cake I’ve seen sold in local bakeries and coffee houses were actually baked slice by slice.
My pursuit of a cake pan took the bulk of an evening and meant I didn’t have time to hit the gym. Of course, that didn’t really matter after I traversed Seoul and Gwangmyeong for hours looking for a pan that would suffice, my enthusiasm for the cake effort quickly diminishing. As I ambled up and down aisle after aisle, I realized that this effort taking me an entire evening in Korea would have been completed in a 20-minute trip to Wal-Mart in the States—and that’s only if I didn’t already have a plethora of pans waiting for me in my kitchen cupboard at home (which I would). Just when I was ready to kick of my high heels and continue the search in stocking feet, I finally found a little square pan, but it was only 20cm x 20cm. “Okay, Abby, roll with the punches. You can make two cakes with a smaller pan!” As I walked home, feeling equal parts defeated and relieved, I realized my lacking conversion skills, not to mention non-existent math prowess, would plague this entire effort. The cake mix from the States called for measurements in tablespoons and cups and my kitchen (far from Suzie Homemaker’s utopia) is devoid of any kind of measuring apparatus, let alone those of the American variety. The butter I found at my local grocery store (which cost me nearly $10) came in a huge block, not four convenient sticks like this lazy American is used to. Thankfully, the eggs came in typical form, otherwise I would have thrown up my arms in utter vexation. Saturday morning I approached my oven, ready to put an end to this fiasco and get this thing baked. The box says 350 degrees, but the dial on my oven only goes to 300 . . . oh yeah,
Celcius. After booting up my computer and consulting a handy Internet converter, I was able to overcome obstacle number 5,000 in this mission. So I mixed up the batter, throwing arbitrary amounts of water and butter into the fray, baked the cake at a temperature somewhere between 100 and 250 degrees Celcius, and ended up with two decent-looking 20cm x 20cm squares of chocolately goodness. The 200 . . . or 500 . . . calories this cake will add to my hips will not be regretted!
In my six months living in Korea I’ve figured out how to take care of the basics: grocery shopping, dry cleaning, finding a gym, getting from one part of the city to the other. Other seemingly simple endeavors can become extremely complex, particularly if I’m anticipating that they'll be simple. A case in point is my pursuit of a home-baked chocolate cake, complete with chocolate icing. Jessica’s only birthday request this year was a big piece of fluffy, chocolate cake. You can find “chocolate cake” in Korea, but it never tastes the way you expect it to. Your mouth waters as you gaze at the slices just beyond a bakery's glass case, but once you fork over the exorbitant price and take the first bite, you realize it’s either too airy, not sweet enough, or possesses some other quality that leaves you thinking, “I just ate 200 calories for nothing.” So, the first task of my mission was to get my hands on a cake mix from the States. Thankfully, this hurricane was borne of an even stronger and more determined force: Paula Rhodes (a.k.a. Mom). Empathetic to the sweet tooth of strangers far and wide, Mom immediately jumped to the task and located a light-weight cake mix and corresponding icing mix and mailed them to Korea weeks ahead of Jessica's big day. That’s when I had to step up and see this plan through to completion, which meant finding a cake pan and candles (I figured out where to find eggs and butter sometime during week two in Korea). Who knew a cake pan would be so hard to come by? In fact, who knew no one in the wider Gwangmyeong City area even sells a standard 9x13 pan (or however that converts to centimeters). I started to wonder if the slices of cake I’ve seen sold in local bakeries and coffee houses were actually baked slice by slice. 
My pursuit of a cake pan took the bulk of an evening and meant I didn’t have time to hit the gym. Of course, that didn’t really matter after I traversed Seoul and Gwangmyeong for hours looking for a pan that would suffice, my enthusiasm for the cake effort quickly diminishing. As I ambled up and down aisle after aisle, I realized that this effort taking me an entire evening in Korea would have been completed in a 20-minute trip to Wal-Mart in the States—and that’s only if I didn’t already have a plethora of pans waiting for me in my kitchen cupboard at home (which I would). Just when I was ready to kick of my high heels and continue the search in stocking feet, I finally found a little square pan, but it was only 20cm x 20cm. “Okay, Abby, roll with the punches. You can make two cakes with a smaller pan!” As I walked home, feeling equal parts defeated and relieved, I realized my lacking conversion skills, not to mention non-existent math prowess, would plague this entire effort. The cake mix from the States called for measurements in tablespoons and cups and my kitchen (far from Suzie Homemaker’s utopia) is devoid of any kind of measuring apparatus, let alone those of the American variety. The butter I found at my local grocery store (which cost me nearly $10) came in a huge block, not four convenient sticks like this lazy American is used to. Thankfully, the eggs came in typical form, otherwise I would have thrown up my arms in utter vexation. Saturday morning I approached my oven, ready to put an end to this fiasco and get this thing baked. The box says 350 degrees, but the dial on my oven only goes to 300 . . . oh yeah, Celcius. After booting up my computer and consulting a handy Internet converter, I was able to overcome obstacle number 5,000 in this mission. So I mixed up the batter, throwing arbitrary amounts of water and butter into the fray, baked the cake at a temperature somewhere between 100 and 250 degrees Celcius, and ended up with two decent-looking 20cm x 20cm squares of chocolately goodness. The 200 . . . or 500 . . . calories this cake will add to my hips will not be regretted!
1 comment:
you're funny. and i want to be your stalker.
love,
gary.
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