I attempted to make Maria's birthday cake here in Romania. I used a recipe that I love from the states that is fairly easy.
I started by having a co-worker of Steve's translate the ingredients into the Romanian equivalent. For some of the items it was as close as she could think of! Then I had to convert all the measurements to metric.
Now for the baking. Of course we still haven't found measuring spoons so I estimated as close as possible. When I opened what we thought was baker's unsweetened chocolate it turned out to be regular chocolate. So I cut the sugar in half. They also have only baking powder and soda combined so we had to use that.
The final product was fair. Maria said it would do. It wasn't as "chocolatey" as in the states and it didn't rise good. Maybe that was the temperature in the oven or the baking powder/soda issue.
The frosting turned out very good so we put LOTS of frosting on the cake. I had cut the cake and made a "7" hoping the novelty of the number would distract from the not so great cake! We topped the frosting with colored sprinkles and headed to the gym for team practice.
The girls lined up shortest to tallest to prepare for the cake. Then, bless pat, they sang Happy Birthday in ENGLISH! We were stunned! Then I cut the cake and most of them ate it.
It was a pretty good start to the Birthday Weekend.
