Yesterday, I had a really cool class, then ran errands and ate ice cream with Al. Then I met up with friends for a grill party, where I failed at making daisy chains, but ate a hamburger, so it was okay. After that it was time for the couchsurfer meetup, where I got to geek out with a Danish guy over Scandinavian languages. And then Saturday night ended at a giant student party at a dorm on the north campus, where I had an intense discussion about identifying gay Germans and watched a guy play a weird electric guitar/violin thing, at least for thirty seconds until the music was horrible so the Kiwi and I bounced.
Today I slept until noon, and woke up to discover it was 80 degrees out and absolutely gorgeous. I did crap tons of laundry, hung it outside to dry, and read Game of Thrones down by the river. Then the Kiwi came over, and we attempted to bake.
British Friend had invited the two of us to German couchsurfer friend's house for dinner, so we decided we'd bake up a pavlova to bring with us. It sounds like a Russian tennis player, but it's actually a Kiwi/Australian dessert, and it's (supposed to look) like so:
Basically, it's a meringue, with whip cream and fruit on top. The meringue part took forever--we had to whip everything by hand and we were tired from the party last night. But it came out pretty good (we thought), so we packed the fruit and the cream in her book bag, and tried to figure out how we were going to get a cake from point A to B, on a bike, without breaking it. The only thing in my house big enough for the cake to fit on was a frying pan of all things, so we threw it on and wrapped the entire monstrosity in nine thousand layers of tin foil and plastic wrap, which didn't look weird at all. Oh, and we brought our own whisk.
We got only slightly lost on the way, but arrived at the friend's house with the cake more or less intact. Immediately we started whipping the whipped cream. The problem, as we discovered, was that whipped cream is a fickle bitch of a mistress. If you don't whip the cream hard enough, it turns into butter, and if you don't whip it fast enough, it also turns into butter. Whipping it by hand, we had no chance. Next thing we knew, we had a bowl of horrible, lumpy, half-butter-half-cream ridiculousness. We decided to be adventurous and poured it on the cake anyway.
Feeling brave, we all tried a piece, only to discover that contrary to popular belief, our cake wasn't even all the way cooked. Many, many adjectives were used to describe out creation, very few of them positive. In the end, the final product was just too horrible to eat, so we resorted to poking it with knives and making fun of it.
The real hilarity ensued when we tried to get rid of it. Once even poking the cake had started to lose its luster, I picked up the frying pan and took it inside to go dispose of the clusterfuck. "Wait!" yelled the German couchsurfer friend. "Don't throw it in the trashcan! It's soluble in water, you might as well just throw it in the toilet." British Friend, the Kiwi and I just stared at him for a few seconds, and then I said, "Really? Really? You want me to throw this into the toilet?" "Yes." "...Yeah, alright."
It's probably one of those stories you had to be there to find funny, but I haven't laughed that hard in a really, really long time. Here I was pouring a liquefied, buttery meringue out of a frying pan and trying to flush it, but there was so much meringue, not enough water. Plus parts of the meringue were still solid chunks of under-cooked horribleness, so they didn't flush, they just sort of bounced up and down in the water, and we were all dying. Finally the German guy came back and said, "Let me help," at which point he promptly whipped out a butcher knife and started hacking at cake pieces. I think that was when I stopped being able to stand up.
After that debacle, with (most of) the cake safely flushed down the pipes, we all went to go see Arsenic and Lace, an English-language play at uni. The theater, as it turned out is a converted operating theater--back in the day, instead of hosting student plays, students came and watched doctors cut people open. The play was really good, really funny, and even more so because we were seeing it on closing night, which is when the actors traditionally prank each other. When I asked how "prank," was defined, the German guy said, "Well, for starters you can be sure that all the prop alcohol is real tonight." We also discovered they added the words "fuck" and "dickhead" at highly opportune moments to the script, and they made David Hasselhoff jokes. Epic win.
It's supposed to be eighty degrees again tomorrow, so Al and I are off to go explore castle ruins. Yay!
Oh, and in case you were wondering what happened to the frying pan and the whisk, the Kiwi had to carry them around in her bookbag all night.
To summarize:
--Life is really, really busy.
--Life is really, really entertaining.
--Baking like a Kiwi is harder than it looks.
--I have shorts on.
--I'm so happy, I don't know what to do with myself.
2 comments:
That is HILARIOUS! I would have loved to be there!
Pavlova is ridiculously difficult to make.
that's the conclusion we came to as well!
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