蛋糕 Day

To celebrate the taking of the HSK (and because among the only three students that regularly attend class, noone is having a birthday this term) I went out to order a cake on Sunday. A bakery near university was offering 8-inch cakes for 25RMB (£1.70).

"How much to add fruit to that?"

"10RMB" the boss replied.

"What!? That's almost as much as the cake itself!"

"Well, you try buying two strawberries, half a kiwi, and two cherries. Noone will sell so little to you".

I didn't believe the guy but was too lazy to try. Fine, I'll blow 35RMB (£2.30) on a stupid cake then.

In the end, it was worth every penny. The sponge was light and fluffy, the presentation perfect, and uncharacteristically, for baked products in China, the cream was proper dairy stuff, not the plastic-tasting rubbish found in most shops. The baker had even piped on 学业有成 ("Success in your exams") for us.

The reddy-orange things in the middle, randomly enough, two cherry tomatoes she'd also seen fit to throw in - technically fruit, I know.

A quick aside: Tomatoes are called 西红柿, literally "Western Red Persimmons". My guess is they came quite late to China, because with the notable exception of Xinjiang cuisine (which use them to make excellent noodle sauce) Chinese cuisine seems to have trouble knowing what to do with them. They'll occasionally find their way into salads, but the most common use seems to be serving them coarsely sliced, chilled and served with sugar as a kind of refreshing dessert.

We sliced the cake using the tiny plastic knives provided, on to even smaller paper plates - soft cake flopping over the edge, and cream getting everywhere. The tiny two-pronged pieces of plastic included were more like mutant toothpicks than forks, so the three students and our two teachers ended up using our hands to stuff fistfuls of cake into our greedy mouths. In short, 35RMB well spent!