Birthday fun

I had a really lovely birthday, celebrating with girlfriends and their children for afternoon tea. I was very spoiled and received some lovely presents.

I had made a deliciously rich chocolate cake with salted caramel cream and chocolate frosting. I was so pleased with how it turned out and it was enjoyed by everyone – none left!

Not that making the cake didn’t go off without a couple of hiccups – this is the Middle East after all. I had done a grocery shop yesterday and needed caster sugar. Not being able to read Arabic I asked for some help and was pointed in the right direction. Should have been easy – grab the sugar and tick off the list. Well not exactly. I grabbed the sugar…….only to get home and after whipping up the eggs and sugar and adding some melted chocolate to the mixture it looked so yummy that I just had stick my finger in to taste. It was horrid, beyond horrid and totally inedible. Atef came home and I got him to read the label only to find that in the store right next to the caster sugar in exactly the same packaging (generic packaging with printed labels) was lemon salt. Yes that’s right, lemon salt. Looked like caster sugar, but definitely wasn’t the taste that I was going for in the cake. Who does that? Really I shouldn’t be surprised as there is definitely no logic in the product placement in the supermarket. The logic behind the lemon salt being next to the caster sugar is that they are from the same company so they need to go together on the shelf. Not very helpful for me. I also ended up having to get a couple of metres of baking paper from the hotel as the only one in the supermarket was 150m – that’s a lot of baking!