China – Shenzhen - II

For the Service Leadership Project (SLP), I was part of the Cultural Differences team along with Michaela and Jia.  For our curriculum, we had a cultural fair to introduce the students to other cultures of the world.  Our countries included Mexico, USA, Japan, Tanzania, and Brazil.  I was in charge of the Brazil booth and I introduced the students to the Portuguese language and offered them a taste of some Brazilian snacks and juices.  For the USA team, Jia taught them some hip hop dance moves and we also decided that we would make an American birthday cake since the cake we have in the US is different in terms of taste and texture than the cake in China.  Michaela bought a box of pillsbury funfetti cake mix, quite possibly the simplest way to make a cake – just add water, eggs, and oil…or so we thought.  Apparently, nobody in China has an oven in their kitchen, and no one bakes.  We asked around to see if any of the kids had an oven, two said they did, but one turned out to be a microwave oven, while the other sounded like an oven.  Rita, one of my mentee’s, had an oven and asked me if she should bring it the next day.  I then got confused and then realized it must be a giant toaster oven.  We stopped by Walmart to grab some supplies and ate dinner at McDonalds.  McDonalds was cheaper and tastier than in the US.  I really liked my carbonated fruity drink with frozen yogurt on top.

Of course since nobody has an oven, baking pans are also nowhere to be found.  We decided to buy rolls of aluminum foil and let Wesley used the engineering concepts he learned at MIT to form some sort of baking pan.  We had a circular piece of metal, and formed the bottom of the ‘pan’ with many layers of foil.  We also didn’t have the correct type of oil – we had olive oil instead of vegetable, so we were a little nervous if the cake would turn out on top of all the other factors.

We let the cake cook for 45 minutes and the top layer was a golden brown.  However when we attempted to move the cake, the middle wobbled and jiggled like it was uncooked, so we stuck it back in for another 30 minutes to let it fully cook.  In the end, we got a fully cooked cake, cut off the burned top, and covered it in frosting – just like in the USA.