Several months ago Lindsay was told to sign up for “German Day” at UC by her German II teacher which she reluctantly did when I agreed with her teacher. Her old Fairview friend, Lyle, told Lindsay she would “make” her sign up saying she would pay the entry fee herself and drag Lindsay along if needed. I assured Lindsay that we would pay the modest entrance fee and told her the day sounded like fun. Thank goodness for one other seventh grader in this high school class.
One of the contests entered was a cake baking contest and after the millions of times that Lindsay has traveled across town to spend time with Lyle for one reason or another I encouraged Lindsay to have Lyle come to our house this time and we would freeze the cake for the contest until the day before. The girls could make an extra one to bring in for their class to sample in the mean time and we would be able to make adjustments if necessary. I may not have a big fancy kitchen but baking is something we can handle… usually! The recipe for the buttercream torte given to them by Frau Koch was not the easiest and I estimated that the cake would take 4 hours to put together for these two girls. I was off a little bit and the four hours turned out to be rushed! The girls were hilarious trying to separate the eggs. I tried to leave them alone unless they had questions but I never got very far from them before the next question came up. Lindsay really surprised Lyle when she ducked under the table and came out with a huge bin of flour that we store under the bench. This, and the size of the bin, made Lyle laugh. In fact, all of our ingredient sizes surprised Lindsay’s friend; the egg carton, the butter container, the vanilla bottle, the carton of cream and the bag of sugar. Lyle was surprised every time so Lindsay took the opportunity to show Lyle around the house a little bit. Apparently living with five kids is different than having just one little sister. Just before we were sticking the cakes into the oven in their spring form pans we found we had a problem with leaking cake batter. I stuck a cookie sheet under them in the oven (though this made one cake lopsided) and confused about why they decided to leak this time I discovered that the girls had decided to put the bottom of the pans in upside down!!! Well, that will do it, and it will make taking the cakes off the pan bottoms a little more challenging as well. We had a good laugh.
While the cake was cooling we made a buttercream pudding type frosting for the top of the cake, which also had to cool. The cakes turned out rather thin, and sort of dry and spongy. We decided that certainly another cake would have to be made in order to have three layers to our torte and we shoved these into the freezer to speed up the cooling time. The recipe had some strange wording a few times like “beating the butter until foamy”. I’ve never seen foamy butter before so I think a few things were lost in the translation. The frosting proved to be most uncooperative and no matter what we did it was lumpy and sort of curdled. The girls tried everything they and I could think of to thicken it but in the end they used the curds to “frost” the cake and we threw the rest away. I had some ideas to “right” the frosting when we would make it the day before for the actual contest cake.
The presentation of this practice cake was… AWFUL! So we added chocolate, cut the cake into square samples for the class on Monday and decided that while it didn’t look so great it tasted… FANTASTIC! The secret ingredient for its phenomenal taste was our handpicked purple raspberries imported from Upstate New York and made into jam, we were sure of this. At 6:30 p.m. we finally were able to send Lyle on her way and I began to make dinner for my own family. Finally!
By the way, the class LOVED the cake samples that Lindsay brought in on Monday. Lindsay said she knew better but compared to the samples she’d tasted that others had brought in it WAS great tasting.
Thursday I settled into making another couple of cakes, including one for us to try that night, and discovered that the recipe I’d had out on the countertop had been attacked by my cat who has a fierce paper fetish!!! I found as many pieces as I could and decided that I could still get through the recipe without too much guess work, though the language barrier all by itself for part of it was sort of a handicap for me let alone the cat-attacked page. The recipe was still a challenge, even for just me; experienced and working in my own kitchen. I made the homemade pudding first and made sure it was well thickened instead of following the recipe’s directions.
Then I set to work on making the cake and cut the total time down to two hours, half the time, not counting its assembly which Lindsay would do later. The cake turned out so much thicker that Lindsay decided to abandon the one in the freezer and split the fresh cake into three layers. We assembled both tortes, and while the frosting STILL was somewhat uncooperative it was much better than the icing creation we’d made on Saturday. The raspberries were sooooo good on this and Lindsay decided that the chocolate really added to the flavor as well. She called Lyle to assure her that all was well with their cake entry.
Here is Lindsay assembling her entry cake and on the right is a slice of the sample cake we enjoyed that evening. It really was quite good; just really not the easiest thing to put together.
Friday morning “Princess Pamina” prepared to take her buttercream torte with her to the day of contests at UC. A German character costume contest, Lyle had wanted to do something with an opera… like Phantom… but Lindsay told her they couldn’t do that… it wasn’t German but Mozart was German and the Magic Flute has been a favorite opera of Lindsay’s since she was at least three. And so they agreed. We have probably listened to this opera on CD 50 times and in fact Haley is sure to this day that we are the only weird family on the planet that drives around listening to things like this or the Preamble to the US Constitution put to music or… and yet they love it. Lyle dressed as the Queen of the Night and the two of them were to present themselves before the judges and, in German, explain their characters and answer any questions (again, in German) that the judges would have for them. All week they had been preparing and making sure that any conversations they might have would be spoken with the proper grammar.
I had to chuckle because underneath that gorgeous gown that Lindsay found in a box down in the basement she was wearing a pair of blue jeans and her cowboy boots of course! Lindsay wanted to be comfortable catching busses and walking around campus all day and she wasn’t planning on wearing the gown and crown any longer than necessary. Haley assured her that she wouldn’t be the only princess standing around downtown waiting for the bus that morning which Lindsay didn’t believe for a minute.
Lindsay took her contest entries and a lunch in her backpack and walked out the door. Amazingly, she discovered that in fact she WAS NOT the only princess standing around down by the school. While she did draw a few stares there was another girl downtown that Haley and Lindsay saw also dressed as a princess (but not for the same reason or contest). Ha! Ha!
Lindsay had a great day but drew quite a few stares in the auditorium as she and her friend, Lyle and Mary Anne, were the only three seventh graders in a crowd of hundreds. They were the youngest by years and people were whispering once again “why are THEY here”. Ironically, Lindsay is amazing at the German language in spite of not starting until second grade, has had straight A’s in every German class she’s taken and as soon as she opens her mouth all doubt about her “belonging” is removed. She can usually out-talk any high school student to the point where they have no idea what she’s even saying and she and the teacher have a good laugh or else the teacher just rolls her eyes. But Lindsay tells the story that her torte did not win… everyone took one look at their label which said “7th grade” and people were avoiding it just because “7th graders don’t know how to bake”. So she and Lyle decided to use some psychology and each took a huge piece of cake for their own plates. Then they watched and people came along and said “hey, a whole bunch of that cake is gone… it must be good” and so they would try it. And it got some compliments after that! “Princess Pamina” did, however, win first place in the costume contest along with her partner “The Queen of the Night”. Lindsay came home with a certificate and a bag full of German prizes including a German shirt so big on her that she decided it’s her new nightshirt. Lindsay had a great day and really enjoyed herself at UC’s German day.
No comments:
Post a Comment