Liz and I teach the advanced Junior 1 kids (7th grade) we are teaching out of a new curriculum that no one has ever used before, so we have been creating the lessons from scratch. This past week the lesson was on Celebrations, specifically birthday celebrations. So naturally Liz and I came up with the brilliant idea of throwing all 240 of our students a birthday party- including cake – and we never turned back. Next thing we knew we were elbows deep in an extreme cake making process. Now baking in China isn’t quite what it is in America. For one, we can’t just run down to the closest Aldi and pick up a dozen cake mixes and cans of frosting. We have to make everything from scratch. And we don’t have powdered sugar readily available. (Making it is generally an option, but to make 1 cup of powdered sugar in the blender takes a good 5 minutes and when you need 45 cups… not gonna happen) Also we don’t have normal sized ovens. We have glorified toaster ovens, that fit 8×8 or 9×9 pans and they don’t have the best track record for baking prettily. Often times the top and edges are blackened when the middle is still jiggling. But nevertheless we didn’t even think twice before we started baking. Luckily the school has given us money on our ID cards to use in the cafeteria and a small convenience/snack store that we call the ‘free store’ and Liz and I were able to get most of our ingredients from there so there was very little out of pocket cost for this endeavor. Just in case you are curious as to the recipe to make cake for 240 people here it is:
Vanilla Cake
16 Cups of White Sugar
8 cups of Butter
32 Eggs
24 Cups of Flour
9 1/3 Tablespoons baking powder
8 Cups of Milk
Frosting
5 cups of butter
45 Cups of Sugar (supposed to be powdered, but like I said, that’s not gonna happen)
9 Tablespoons vanilla
3 cups of milk
This recipe will make you 6 8×8 pans and 12 9×9 pans. Which is enough to feed 240 7th graders. You can find the real recipe here I made it with a few students today (yes after baking all that cake I made another with students today) I put the vanilla in this time and also added an instant vanilla pudding packet and a little extra milk.
We are starting our own bakery.
The transfering of the cakes to the box was a delicate process.
Not all of the cakes looked this bad. Most of them looked relatively good, however the last big cake we made stuck to the bottom of the pan so we had to use one big one and a small one for this cake...
We did stations for class, one station played this 'game' where they unscrambled letters. Other stations made birthday cards, wrote 3 wishes, reviewed their homework, and of course ate cake. I think we fooled them into thinking learning is FUN! 
Coocan and Mercury came over to make lunch today. They wanted to know how to make a cake from scratch. This time I did it right. That is real powdered sugar frosting! When I pulled out my box of 15 different color food dyes their eyes got HUGE. They quickly selected the color blue for the cake. It was quite delicious. However, I will not be eating or making cake for a looooong time.
