My Kichwa daughter,
Celia, asked me to teach her to bake a cake.
She had never baked
one herself and wanted to know how it was done.
The first cake ever
my mom taught me to do was a marbled chocolate and vanilla cake we call “tiger
cake” in Finland.
The name comes from
the black and white, or yellowy and brown, stripes that the cake has.
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| Mixing the sugar with the eggs. |
It is also the cake
my son has been begging me to do because he really likes it and we haven’t had
it for a while.
The cake isn’t
difficult to do.
You have to mix the
softened margarine or butter with half of the sugar in one bowl, until it’s
foamy.
In another bowl you
mix the dry ingredients, or flour and baking powder.
And yet in another
bowl, you mix the eggs with the rest of the sugar.
After the eggs are
beaten into beautiful white foam, you need to add the dry ingredients and some
milk.
Beat them together
and add the margarine mix and at last, a swirl of vanilla essence.
When everything is
mixed well, take a half, or a third, of the mix.
The amount depends on
how much chocolaty stripes you want in your cake.
Mix this half with
chocolate powder.
In a well-buttered
pan that is covered with bread crumbs, I use the ones they sell in the bakeries
that has really tiny crumbs, pour the white mix.
After you have poured
the white mix, cover it with the chocolate mix.
Then you need to take
a ladle or a spoon, a fork is OK too, and stick it in the mix.
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| Swooping around with the laddle. |
Swoop it around a bit
and then rise it up.
Repeat this few times
but be careful not to mix the two colors totally.
You just want to get
some stripes on that tiger.
After the cake was
baked and waiting to cool off, I had to leave to a work meeting.
I asked my son to
look after the cake so that the dogs or the ants wouldn’t get into it.
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| This is what was left of the cake when I came home. |
Well, that was what
was waiting for me when I got home; I think the picture is worth more than
thousand words this time.
My son had two friends over and he had decided
to serve them cake and since he was worried about cutting himself with the
knife.
Or that’s what he
told me afterwards, he just grabbed the cake with his hands.
Let’s say that I was
a bit annoyed and I told him that he owned me a cake because I wasn’t going to
eat that one.
Or give any of it to
Celia so she could try it out.
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| The cake before my son decided to take a bite. |
The good thing is
that we actually had fun with my son when I taught him how to make the cake.
He’s ten now, the
same age I was when my mom taught me to do the tiger cake.
So I was happy to be
able to continue the tradition.
This cake recipe is
actually from my great-grandmother and it has been in her family even before
it.
Hope you will enjoy
it also.
 |
| Eating the batter, best part of baking a cake. |
You’ll need:
4 eggs
4 dl sugar
250 grams of
margarine or butter (originally calls for butter)
6 dl wheat flour
1 table spoon of
baking powder
1 dl of milk
1 table spoon of
vanilla essence
1 dl of chocolate
powder
1. Mix the margarine
with half of the sugar until it’s foamy.
2. Mix the flour with
the baking powder.
3. Mix the other half
of the sugar with the eggs until white foam forms.
4. Mix the dry
ingredients with the egg foam, add milk.
5. Mix carefully the
margarine with the rest of the batter.
6. Add vanilla essence.
7. Remove half (or
third) of the mix and add the chocolate powder.
8. Pour the white mix
into a well-buttered pan.
9. Mix the two
batters to form stripes.
10. Bake in 175
Celsius for an hour.
Enjoy!
If you want to know more about my Kichwa daughter you can read a post here.
