Norway Cake

Behold…the worst looking and tasting birthday cake in the history of the world.

I wanted to do something nice for Steve’s birthday, since it was, as I mentioned, a big one. Being where we are in Norway at the moment, there is no wonderful restaurant to take him to, no bakery from which to buy a stellar cake.

My mother used to make these wonderful birthday cakes for us when I was growing up. Made from scratch of course, but she would cut the cake into shapes and decorate them so that they looked like whatever was our favorite thing of the moment: a rocket ship, a Smurf, etc.

I knew I couldn’t make anything from scratch here, or make anything that would be that creative, but I thought I could at least make him a pretty and delicious birthday cake.

At home, I love cake-mix cakes from the grocery store, so I thought I would give it a go here. In the store, I had to ask two very tall Norwegian guys to translate the directions on the back of the mix for me, so I would know what I needed to add and how much of it.

The problem was that the units for the water and butter that I needed to use were in deciliters. Now I don’t know about you, but I had never heard of a deciliter before, and I had absolutely no idea what to make of it. Add to this the problem that in the cabin, the measuring cups were in ounces, milliliters, and grams. So that was no help.

I went online and the conversion from deciliters wound up as 10 ounces of water and 6 ounces of butter. That seemed like an awful lot of melted butter to me, but oh well.

Right off the bat, it just didn’t seem right. I used only about half of the butter because it just looked too liquidy after all the water. But the batter just didn’t taste right. Normally I love to lick spoons and mixing bowls clean, but one taste of this one and I had had enough.

Well, I thought, maybe it will taste better once it’s cooked. It smelled all right as it baked, and so I was encouraged.

After it cooled I made the icing, which was nearly flavorless and a bit runny.

Then I wrote “Happy Birthday, 7” on the cake (7 is my nickname for Steve). I wish I could tell you that this message was written by either the four-year-old or the goat next door, but alas, I cannot. That disastrous scrawl is mine.

In my defense, I didn’t see until way too late the little attachment in the bottom of the box which would have allowed the gel to come out of the tube in a thin lovely line. I was just squeezing it straight out of the large opening, so it was like writing with a tube of toothpaste.

The other problem, as you can see, is that when I was testing the cake for doneness, I stabbed it so many times in the middle that I created this deep crevasse into which most of the icing and the “H” and “D” eventually slid.

As evidence of his love for me, when Steve looked at this cake, he gave a smile like it was the most wonderful cake he’d ever seen, though his expression could simply have been the beginnings of hysterical laughter, hard to say. He even had me take his picture with it, God bless him.

Then, we tasted it. We took one bite, and we tried to pretend that it was good. We tried another bite, and made a gallant effort to pretend it was at least edible. Then we took another bite and just gave up.

It reminded me a little of a Passover cake, if anyone has ever had one of those mixes. But even that assessment I think is generous.

This mix was clearly made by a people who have never actually tasted cake before. And why should they? They’re far too busy climbing mountains and running up glaciers to bother with cake.

I’m not sure what the chocolate flavoring was that was added to the mix, but let me tell you it was not cocoa.

It was kind of like eating a cake that was made from a leftover mashed potato, with some ground up tree bark added for flavor.

This was not exactly what I wanted to serve my hubby on his birthday, but we laughed about it, and I promised him something lovely in Italy to make up for it.

We found an old Ritter Sport chocolate bar which had melted in the car and then reformed, so we ate that instead.

Happy Birthday, Steve!