Let them eat cake!

This is the story of the never ending packets of Cole's Mud Cake mixes.

When you live on the 'other side of the world' with few conveniences from home and a very, very little paycheck, and someone from Shanghai offers you a bag of 'food stuff' to take home with you, it brings new meaning to the phrase 'never look a gift horse in the mouth'. Even if you don't eat it, which to be honest, most of the imported dry goods we can get here aren't things we usually eat due to the copious amounts of chemicals and preservatives needed to keep them good enough to last being imported (think the scene in the movie Wal-E where the whole earth is destroyed...but there are still Hostess Twinkies), somebody will. Or they'll come in useful for something. Or even if you don't particularly like cake for your birthday, you'll be getting it...for this birthday and any subsequent birthdays until you run out of packet cake mixes.

I thought Jason's would be the last one, but somehow, there is still one more box. I think they're breeding.

Don't get me wrong -- I am really grateful. That same bag o' goodies included things like sun-dried tomatoes, couscous, museli bars and some seriously good pasta sauce from Marks and Spencer. I just can't seem to use up these dang packet cake mixes! On first thought, they seem like a good, inexpensive way of baking a birthday cake. Except that one packet cake mix uses over 250g (that's more than a stick) of butter turning it into a not very inexpensive birthday cake after all. Times that by four or so packet cake mixes and you see that some improvisations must be done.

I've learnt a lot about cooking since being here. There's so many different ways to, excuse the expression, skin a cat (or a dog if you live in Guangxi), that there's not really any excuse to say "I can't make that because we can't get (insert ingredient here ie: canned pumpkin...dear Lord, do you know how many times I heard that one at Thanksgiving?!)" Not that I'm your regular Jamie Oliver by any stretch of the imagination, but for example, yoghurt can replace sour cream in almost anything, butter (thanks to the lovely vegans out there) can be replaced by applesauce and bananas, and legumes can bulk out just about anything. My personal favourite is that you can make sour cream from UHT whipping cream and a dash of vinegar. The chemical reaction gives you a thick, sour cream-like subustance. Amazing. Maybe it really is. However, the UHT whipping cream in and of itself is pretty gross and outrageously expensive so I have never done this one personally. The internet is my best friend.

So it was a Banana Mud Cake. I think, after practically sitting in front of the most temperamental oven for 40 minutes, it came out pretty well. I only substituted half of the butter for bananas (one day, I should be brave enough to do the whole thing). Now we have a Mud Cake, a birthday boy...ah yes, we need some guests.

Neither of us are really party people. Hilarious considering our chosen profession is so people oriented. And Chinese people LOVE parties. Especially birthday parties. They take great pride in being invited, showing up with a 'cute' gift (wrapped in paper with strange, strange Chinglish sayings on it), and playing games. You know the kind where you have to follow the instructions and if you mess it up you get to stand in the middle and belt out karaoke songs. Its not much of a punishment because this seems to be the favourite part of the game. So after much consideration of the fact we are living in a borrowed house and that since we're leaving soon, a small party would be a good way to spend some time with our closer Chinese friends, but we had to make it so there was no karaoke. I hate karaoke. I really do. But we needed people to eat this cake. So we decided to see how the board games would go.

In a word, marvelously. In fact, long after most of our foreign friends had left, our Chinese friends were still on the floor playing 'Ticket to Ride' with Jason banning all other languages bar English and Mandarin (you gotta keep your eye on those Cantonese speakers...) and me just trying to keep my eyes open when they decided 11.30pm was a good time to take photos (I was done taking photos at that point so I have none of those unfortunately). However, the party was a roaring success with everyone saying they loved the Banana Mud Cake.

Well, there's at least one more where that came from...