Making Cake in the Bathroom

My friend Jenn and I wrote this together for our blogs after sharing a hilarious cake making experience. Here's the story, told from her perspective in italics but with my parts in parentheses. Enjoy!


So I was spending the night with one of my friends after a dinner for folks at my church. By the time we got back to her apartment it was pretty late and her roommate was already in bed. My friend, Stephanie, had to make a cake for a co-worker's birthday the next day. So we set to baking as quietly as we could, which is no small task in a tiny Japanese apartment with walls like paper.

(It's also no small task when cake mixes cost 800 yen (about $10) in Japan instead of $1, and everything has to be from scratch. And even that would be okay if I was good at remembering people's birthdays, but usually I remember soon after the store closes on the night before we need a cake. I've made some interesting cakes – including a “Chocolate Mayonaise” surprise which, surprisingly, was very good the first time. But the second time I made it, it tasted disgustingly like mayonaise. I guess it needed icing...)

We measured out all of the stuff and were just about to start mixing when we realized that the mixer was going to be pretty loud. So we decided to go into the room farthest away from the roommate's room, which happened to be the bathroom. Keep in mind that the bathroom is not where the toilet is in Japan. The toilet is seperate from the bathing area. Because the bathing are is clean and the toilet is dirty and they can't be together. At least I think that is their thinking behind it.
(We were doing SO well at being quiet – you wouldn't have even known we were there. We couldn't let the mixer ruin our track record, even if we did have to go to an unusual location...)

So Stephanie was mixing and I kept telling her that she hadn't mixed enough. I felt like my mom when I was little and I never seemed to have mixed it enough, she always wanted me to mix it a bit more.
(Something you should know is that I've come to see directions on a recipe as mere suggestions/guidelines– for example, 2 tsp of vanilla means “pour in enough vanilla until it looks like there are about 2 teaspoons of it in the bowl” and “cream egg, butter, and sugar together” is meant for people who have lots of extra time and want to mix the batter twice. A direction like “use an electric mixer for 2 minutes” can easily be changed to “stir with a wooden spoon just until you can't see dry flour anymore. I've never had a cake fail too horribly, so I figured I wasn't doing anything terribly wrong. But I trusted Jenn to know how to make a REALLY good cake, since she's been a pastry chef in Switzerland, after all!)

Anyway, Stephanie finally mixed it to my satisfaction and we poured it into the pan, and put it into the oven only to discover that the oven had turned itself off. It is some crazy Japanese oven with a mind of its own. I didn't try to understand how it worked. Stephanie seemed to know how to fix it. It did get going again and preheated itself and we put the cake in.

It smelled wonderful when it came out of the oven. I don't know how it tasted, although if it was half as good as the batter it was a good cake. I tasted lots of the batter. All good cooks do.
(It tasted really good – very possibly the best cake I have ever made that wasn't a Betty Crocker mix. I wonder if it has anything to do with following directions...or maybe the secret is mixing it in the bathroom...)