A couple of days ago, the girls had to stay home from school, and we decided to bake a cake. I had found a recipe for a Curacaoan chocolate cake, and I thought I'd make it as part of my Curacaoan menu. Camila, however, wanted to make the lemon cake recipe which appeared in this month's issue of High Five magazine. She loves the magazine and wants to do all the activities.

So with Camila wanting to do the lemon cake, and Mika wanting to do the chocolate one, we had no recourse but to do both :-) Fortunately they were both fairly simple to make and both recipes made just enough cake for an 8x8 cake pan.

We all worked on the lemon cake recipe (recipe below), but Mika made the chocolate cake recipe ALL BY HERSELF. Yep. She read the instructions by herself, she measured the ingredients by herself, and mix them in by herself. It was her first time alone, so she can't really be faulted for misreading the instructions and mixing in the water and vinegar with the cocoa and sugar before she put the flour, and so forth. All in all, I think she did a good job, and the cake tasted great. It was pretty dense and chewy (not in a good way), but I don't know if that was because of her mistakes, or because this turned out to be a vegan (no eggs) cake. In any case, she thought there was nothing wrong with it.

The kids actually did not like the perfectly baked lemon cake. I think the problem was the strong olive oil flavor it had. I thought it was quite good - but I can understand little kids not liking it. I'm not copying the recipe precisely for that reason.

We didn't have any frosting for the cakes, so I whipped some cream and use that. Alas, we couldn't wait so we put it on the cakes when they were still too warm! Later the girls, all by themselves, decided to decorate their cakes with chocolate chips.