Cooking in the Highlands 101.

This is a cake. The bit we did right was to bake it in a bundt pan. Now on to the bits we did wrong.

Everyone who has ever made baked goods at 5,500 feet (roughly our elevation) is probably laughing by now. Everyone who isn't is wondering what the big deal is.

Epicurious.com has a great little article on the science of why our cake turned out two inches high and crunchy, but the short version is that things rise very fast and fall very hard. Next time, we'll try adding an egg or increasing the liquid and decreasing the baking soda. Also, baking with a cake tube or in a bundt pan is advised, as is - at this height - greasing the pan, lining the pan with parchment paper, greasing the parchment paper, and flouring the greased parchment paper, in order to facilitate cake removal. We used a broad-bladed plastic knife, and most of the cake got detached eventually.

The icing is a homemade buttercream icing, substituting fresh-squeezed orange juice for milk and vanilla. It's positively scrumptious. It's also take 2 of making icing. Take one ended with me saying to Angel: "Corn flour? I didn't know that you used corn flour in icing..." Apparently, both the yellow bag of corn starch (corn flour here) and the yellow bag of icing sugar were open, filled with fine white powder, and he didn't read the label clearly. Thankfully, it wasn't actually on the cake at the time.

So far, mostly, we've been eating quite well on the large quantities of meat we brought home from Hagen. Not having access to staples (should have bought more onions!) and the market being outside the gates (bring a guide!) has forced some creative solutions involving milk, cheese, and sour cream instead of yogurt, but we've managed a passable falafel, spaghetti and meatballs, and all manner of regular home dishes. Baking is the real adventure.

Unfortunately, the microwave smokes when you turn it on, and that didn't seem very safe, so we're limited to the gas stove. Have learned all over again about thawing things in warm water baths. We have a pasta pot and I found a pressure cooker today but don't know where the little doohickey that goes on top might be. There was a steamer disc, so we had green beans today as well. We've got fresh-sliced pineapple, bananas ripened on the top of the fridge (buy them green or they go bad within days), fresh oranges and nectarines, sugar fruits (sweet, with lots of seeds like pomegranates), and some kind of lumpy ovoid fruit I don't remember the name of and am therefore not sure about eating. Also: peanuts, still on their stems. If anyone knows how to roast them we're all ears!