It is so interesting living in Africa and learning how to improvise. I’ve already adopted a new acronym—TIA—“This is Africa”. Hamburgers are not a staple food, so hamburger buns in most places are non-existent. Several from our group made the buns from scratch. They were tiny, but oh so perfect! Baked potatoes were a favored menu item. Sour cream is another non-existent grocery store item. Thankfully, some of the crew knew how to make a cream from scratch that did the trick. And then came dessert…

I knew that our leader had some cake mixes. She also had some icing left from a birthday celebration. All I needed was a good recipe for melting chocolate and I was on my way to introducing my friends to the world of CAKE BALLS! Several times in my brainstorming, I feared I would have to abandon my quest. Certain important elements were missing, like a microwave (or even a double broiler) and decent baking chocolate. Jenny (also familiar with cake balls) and I decided that we would still give it our best shot and dove in headfirst. I would have loved to make funfetti balls, but making a white chocolate dipping mix was definitely out of the question. We opted instead to use a chocolate cake mix and a cherry chip cake mix for two batches of cake balls, both coated with milk chocolate. At first, everything seemed to be going our way. We got the cakes baked barely before the kitchen closed Saturday evening, and aside from me forcing myself to ignore the fact that the vegetable oil in Africa has floating bits of who knows what in it, all went well. Since we only had half a tub of icing left over from the birthday celebration, we mixed up another cup or so of icing using someone’s from-scratch recipe. Icing sugar (powdered sugar to us American folks), butter, milk, and vanilla. Short aside: some of the milk here doesn’t get refrigerated until after it’s opened. The one we used last night has an unopened expiration date of sometime in 2010. That is really disturbing.

After we got back from the hospital visitation Sunday morning, we immediately began mixing the baked cakes with the icing. We rolled them into balls and headed for the kitchen to try our hands at melting the chocolate for dipping. Instead of a double-broiler, we found two camping pots and stacked one on top of another. For our chocolate, we had several Cadbury milk chocolate bars (think Hershey bars). I already knew that it would take a miracle for this to work, but we were hoping (and praying) for the best! Unfortunately our fears were realized when the chocolate would melt only to quickly harden again. No amount of shortening (which was more what we use as butter in the States) would stop this from happening. Finally, we decided to work with what we had. There would be no carefree dipping of the cake balls. Instead, we had to mold the chocolate around each ball, one by messy one. I think it can go without saying that these were the ugliest cake balls I have ever seen or made. We soon realized that the chocolate was not going to harden like we wanted, so we rotated them in and out of onion-smelling refrigerator—crossing our fingers that the cake balls wouldn’t come out tasting like onions! I was already beyond frustration and simply praying that the things would just be edible! There had been a huge hype around the dorms about these “cake balls” that no one had ever heard of. Jenny and I knew we were lucky in the fact that since no one had ever heard of them, they wouldn’t realize that they were the most pathetic cake balls on the face of this earth. In the end, they were edible and quite tasty, but unfortunately they were still a far cry away from the tiny bits of heaven that I am used to eating back home! People were very complimentary and I believe they sincerely enjoyed them, however, I did mention to most of them that I hope one day they can taste a true, unadulterated, cake ball.

Our fabulous table decorations. The children made the paper cut-outs, Jenny and setup crew picked the flowers, and Fanta bottles were used as candle holders.

My plate complete with mac 'n' cheese, bacon cheeseburger, baked potato with "sour cream", grilled veggies, and fruit salad.

Jenny and I proudly (or not so proudly) showing off our final product!