My Not So Easy Bake Oven

This is a taste of things to come. In January I want to begin to share with you some of the challenges we've faced living in China, and the kitchen could definitely be one category. It's the size of a match box and thoroughly equiped with one item, a wok. Evidently that is the only piece of cookware you need in China. If you have that, a wooden spatula, chopsticks, and a flame, you should be good to go. An oven is pretty unheard of. Why would you need an oven? No one bakes anything. Fortunately my housemate, Gong Ping, has invested in a toaster oven and I use it all the time. My friend Emily has a real oven. A few years ago she was thrilled to find a frozen turkey at Thanksgiving at Sams Club. She had to have an oven shipped in and special people brought in to install it (since no one here knows of such things) and by the time she got that all done and went back to Sam's the turkey was gone. My friend Chana tried to cook a ham for Thankgiving this year and could not get it in her toaster oven at all. So baking is a little bit of a challenge here. But you know I like a challenge. I managed to get some little muffin cup liners at the tiny American imports store and my friend Amy gave me a little silicone cake pan that her mum sent her from England. I decided that we were having a birthday cake for *youknowWho* for Christmas, since it is His birthday and all. I had learned from all the cookies I baked at Thanksgiving to use the top and bottom heating elements so that one or the other parts aren't raw, but it is still very uneven heating and quite tricky. I found some little silver tart tins at Metro and used those to support the liners, but then had to take them out once they firmed up so that the bottoms would cook. But it worked, and we had our cakes! Abbey loves baking and when we made the royal icing for her gingerbread house she got her first chance to lick the beaters. Gong Ping also ordered a mixer off the internet and another friend here had her husband bring her one from America, so we have access to two of those! We've made lots of muffins too. It really does feel like an Easy Bake oven size wise and I am always on the look out for small pans, but when I check every two minutes and shuffle the pans around, easy is not the word that comes to mind. I trust that you are all feeling grateful for your granite counter tops and Kitchen Aid mixers. And this brings me to a blog that has been so encouraging. This gal amazes me with what she does with her little toaster oven in Siping and I love to read about her work with the orphanage there and her love for the people of China.