Blueper B. and the Birthday Boy's Cake

Hi!  It's me, Blueper B., and I'm back!!!

Finally The Lady and Mister Guy have finished their school year and we can do stuff together.  I miss them when they are teaching, but I know that they need to do that to make money so that they can take care of me, their furry blue and orange monster.

We started off our summer vacation together by celebrating Mister Guy's birthday.  I learned that on your birthday people make you special treats.  You can have anything you want.  Mister Guy wanted a Citrus Angel Food Cake.  The Lady said that she would make it for him.  I asked if I could help because I have never made a cake before and I was ready to learn something new.  I'm not sure that The Lady really wanted my help, but I made her feel guilty when I said that she had spent the last nine months teaching her students at school new stuff and I had waited patiently.  Now it was my turn for her to teach me.  It worked! :-)  I got to help make the cake.  It was a lot of work!!!

The Lady said that some people make their cakes by buying a box of mixed up stuff at the grocery store and then all they have to do is add one or two things and they had a cake.  We didn't make ours that way.  She said we were going to make it from scratch.  Scratch?   I thought scratch was what you did when something made your fur feel funny.  The Lady explained to me that making a cake from scratch means that you don't buy a box of mix from the store; you collect all of your ingredients yourself.  I asked her how you knew what ingredients you need and she showed me a piece of paper called a receipt...no, a recipe.  It tells you all of the ingredients that you need and then exactly what you are supposed to do with them.  The cake that Mister Guy wanted had a lot of ingredients, more than I could count on my orange fingers.  The Lady said that we had to get all of our ingredients out and measured and ready to go because this cake was kind of temperamental...whatever that means.  I didn't ask because I was more interested in learning how to make a cake than learning new words that day.  Some day I'll find out what temperamental means.

The Lady said that we would start by zesting an orange.  I didn't know what "zesting" meant either.  This time I asked because it had something to do with making the cake.  The Lady showed me how to use a special tool, a "zester."  

A zester is used to scrape the the outer skin from the orange into tiny little pieces.  I don't know why you want to take off the pretty bright orange skin, but I am a good monster and I followed The Lady's instructions.

She told me that the the zest would eventually go into the cake and make it taste "orangy." 

 I was surprised that we did not use the inside of the orange.  I ate it.  This monster needed a little nourishment to get him through this adventure.

Next we had to juice a lemon.  

Just kidding.  This is not how it's done.  Juicing a lemon took a special tool too...a juicer.  Haha.

Juicing the lemon was easy.  Again, we did not use the inside of the lemon.

Next we had to separate the eggs.  I asked if there was a special cooking tool for that too.  The Lady said that there was, but that she did not have one so we would separate our eggs without one.  The Lady said that the eggs are the most important part if this angel food cake that Mister Guy wants.  She said that eggs are fragile and that I was going to have to be very careful if I was going to help with this part.  

(I know what fragile means.  The Lady taught me that word early because she was worried that I would break something in the stores when we go shopping.  Sometimes I am not aware of how big my monster hands and horns are and I don't control them very well.)  

The Lady explained that we had to crack the eggs and put the white part in one bowl and the yellow part in another bowl.  I wasn't so sure that I could do that all by myself so I asked Mister Guy to help me. 

 Bad idea!  Either he can't tell the difference between white and yellow or his hands are less controllable than my monster hands.  He kept dropping the yellow part in the white bowl.  Finally we got twelve eggs cracked and separated.  We only needed the white bowl for the cake.

We were finally ready to start mixing all of the ingredients together.  Here came another kitchen tool. This one was great big!  It was blue and had weird pieces attached to it and it had to be plugged in.  

I thought that we would just use a big spoon and stir everything in a big bowl.  I was such a wrong blue and orange furry monster!  First we had to whip the eggs in this big blue machine.  

The Lady talked about foam and soft peaks and stiff peaks.  I wasn't really interested in all of that.  This was taking a long time.  Little by little we got all of the ingredients in the bowl and finally it was time to put the cake in the pan and bake it.  The Lady asked me to get the pan for her.

This is the strangest looking pan I have ever seen!  First of all, it fell apart when I picked it up.  I thought it would make better armor for a monster in case he had to do battle with that big blue kitchen machine. 

I felt sort of like Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street except that I'm a happy monster, not a grouchy one!

 The Lady was not amused.  She suggested that perhaps this was taking so long because I was not giving my full attention to the task at hand.  Possibly, but I was bored with the cake by this point.

We got the cake in the pan and in the oven.  Woohoo!  Playtime!  Again I was wrong.  The Lady told me that now we had to clean up all the mess that we had made in the kitchen.  This cake making thing is a whole lot less fun than I thought it would be.  Because I am a good monster, I helped The Lady wash all the stuff that we got dirty making this cake. 

 The only good part of this cleaning up part was that I got to lick the the bowl.  

The uncooked batter tasted good so I figured the cake would too!

When the cake came out of the oven, we had to let it cool.  Then The Lady took the pan apart and there was the cake...with a hole in the middle.  That is how it was supposed to be.  It looked light and fluffy.  Mister Guy said is really good.  When I saw how much he liked it, I was glad that The Lady and I had gone to the trouble to make the special cake that he wanted.

I makes me happy when I can make other people happy!

If you want to know exactly how The Lady and I made Mister Guy's birthday cake, The Lady wrote more about it here.