The day we made the oven bleed

My Texan friend Liz recently received a care package including American measuring cups, so today we tested them out by making red velvet cupcakes. This baking adventure is a small example of the challenges of a foreign grocery store, even if everything is still in your native tongue.

American advertising execs should give themselves a huge pat on the back, because I realized today that when I'm walking through the grocery store I typically navigate by brand. I need cream cheese? I just look for the Philadelphia label. I want canned fruit (I never eat canned fruit but this is hypothetical)? I look for yellow rows of Dole.

Well, here they don't have all of those brands, so things take a bit longer. Not to mention that they don't have some things at all, or they go by different names. So, we had to be a bit creative. Our requests for cocoa powder were met with confused looks, and after some handy Googling on my phone, we realized that baking soda is actually this:



So, we got our bicarbonate of soda, grabbed some soft cheese (cream cheese), substituted Nesquik for cocoa and crossed our fingers. Things were going well, until we had a little accident putting the filled muffin cups into the oven. One of the pans slipped, so there was red batter running all over the inside of Liz's SUPER hot oven. We decided since we already had one pan in, and the oven was too hot to really touch, we'd just let the spilled batter go. This was the gory result:



Thankfully, just as we were becoming more and more skeptical of our British baking abilities, the cupcakes came out and turned out just fine! Delicious, even, in my humble opinion:



My Sunday wrapped up with a trip to Hampstead Heath, which is a park overlooking central London. I went with several Italians and a French girl from my course, who were absolutely lovely. We got into a theoretical discussion about love and the Italian notion of "freedom of heart," then stopped off at a coffee shop on the way home. It's a bit too lengthy to explain here, but it was a very European afternoon--in a very good way! I'll leave you with this photo of the Heath as the sun was setting. I hope everyone had a good weekend!



Love,
Jess