Cooking in another country is not a piece of cake, but it is an interesting experience. Maybe cooking a recipe that is native to Brasil would have been an easier introduction to cooking here, but I went for the plunge and made one of my favorite cupcake recipes from home here. The experience was great, confusing, funny, and definitely educational.

The occasion was my cousin’s thirteenth birthday party and she invited two of her friends over to bake the cupcakes that I would be teaching them how to make. The girls were really excited because they love all the decorations and colors that make a cupcake, in my opinion, so delicious. I prepped for one day translating the recipe and trying to find a frosting recipe that would not immediately melt in this humidity, thank you Southern Cooking! The hardest thing to find was the ingredient that had no compatible translation, baking soda.

Here in Brasil it is extremely common that a house will have a cook who prepares all the meals, so two of the cooks and I were working together to try and discover just what baking soda would be. The item that we decided could possibly be baking soda was this kind of thick, possibly gooey block, that after looking at all of our hesitative faces we decided not use. Instead I relied on some knowledge I gained from my eight grade Science Fair Project and I threw in an extra egg or two, which I believe should help the batter rise in the oven, it seemed to do the trick! Looking back at this I think that thick, gooey block may have been yeast, and the cooks would have easily known that the yeast was not baking soda, but that was where my translations got us. A lot of ingredients needed to be thoroughly talked over before being added to make sure it was the right thing to produce the desired effect, and most of the times this ended in laughs and shrugs and with the item being added.

Another thing that produced a lot of confusion for me was the measuring system. I worked hard the day before we baked cupcakes trying to convert my recipe into the metric system, but in a typical Brazilian household this is just not how things are done. When I asked for what I thought would be a measuring cup equivalent to one cup, I was handed a xícara, a teacup. This just goes to show Brazilians resourcefulness, why use measuring cups when a teacup can do just the same thing, and if you need a fourth of a cup just fill up one fourth of the xícara. This system worked fine, the hardest part was to get over was my surprise at receiving a teacup, but the teacup system works and if I felt like there needed to be a little bit more we all gave a shrug and tossed in a little to grow on.

Cupcakes and muffins are not as commonly made in Brasil as in the United States. One thing that I did not even think about was muffin tins, of which there were none! This was a great discovery to find out after the batter was prepared, but we improvised using metal ice cream dishes and scooped the batter into the cupcake papers that we then placed in individual ice cream dishes for baking, and it worked!

The image I have of my first baking experience in Brasil looks like Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmother Fauna when she is baking her birthday cake, which involves poofs of powder in the air, sleeves rolled up, perplexed hair, and batter and frosting all over the place. It was a learning experience that was a success because of the helpful advice from the knowledgeable cooks and fun because of how excited the girls were and also just because it was a funny situation. The girls decorated the cupcakes and they were definitely a birthday party hit!

Xícara                                    -            teacup (~ 1 cup)

Colher de sopa                     -            soup spoon (~ 1 tablespoon)

Colher de café                      -            coffee stirring spoon (~ 1 teaspoon)

Prato de sobremesa            -            dessert plate