Last Thursday was B’s birthday but seeing that we were spending it climbing halfway up a mountain he didn’t get a proper cake. He did get candles stuck into a Snickers bar, but not even for a lazy Pi like me that’s the same thing. The first day after the holiday was the usual “coming down off the travel high”/”depressed to be back in Shenyang” day, so I finally got down to baking yesterday. At the market all they had was some dumpling flour instead of all-purpose which might have been a mistake to get. Oh well. Also, there were no nuts other than peanuts. Hmm. Not very discouraged yet, I found some suspiciously good looking strawberries (probably coated in pesticides and formaldehyde, but let’s not make mountains out of molehills). I still had two boxes of proper German whipping cream, some Korean sugar, French baking powder, Polish vanilla sugar and Chinese eggs and cocoa. A truly international birthday cake!
Sticky brownie cake
2 cups dumpling/all purpose flour 
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1 cup brown sugar
1 packet baking powder
1 packet vanilla sugar
1 cup nuts & chocolate chips
1 teaspoon salt
1 packet instant coffee
1 1/2 cup greek yogurt
1/2 cup oil
2 eggs
For the nuts I actually chopped up a block of caramelized peanuts sold to me in a small village by a Chinese lady who advertised it as a snack. I quickly realized there was no way to bite into that rock-hard thing, but my 
knife quickly shredded it into bits.
I went about it by mixing all the dry ingredients together in one bowl, then in another bowl I combined all the wet ingredients. I know, not exactly how you make a proper cake, but in all my laziness I figured that it has to work, because muffins are made this way and they’re delicious!
Don’t forget the salt!
Don’t forget to add the salt and yes, 3/4 cup of cocoa is accurate – seems like a lot, but that’s what makes the cake so nicely dark and chocolate-y. The bright brown powder is the instant coffee – added for an extra dimension in the flavor. The cake doesn’t taste like coffee at all – but it is very delicious 🙂
Do you a favorite type of eggs? I always try to buy “better” eggs, like free-range eggs, farm eggs and what not, but when someone is trying to sell me an egg for 0.5$ each I cringe – it’s a chicken egg man, how amazing can it be? I went with my usual farm eggs and I think maybe they’re just a little less artificial than the cheap kind, because I got twin yolks! I used to get twin yolks a lot in Poland but in China it’s my second one in 5 years – crazy.
Does it have to do with stricter control over what eggs go in the box or maybe the feed that the chickens eat? Incidentally, Chinese people seem to have way more twins in their population than Europeans. I heard it’s because if you have twins you get to have two kids and therefore circumvent the “one child policy”, so doctors prescribe medication that increased the possibility of multiple pregnancies. Cool, but also, I’d always worry that I won’t be able to tell the kids apart. Are you Jerry? Wait, the mole isn’t there..
Mix it up real nice..
That cake is DARK 😀
Back to the cake. I mixed it all up and popped it in the oven for 40 minutes at the maximum setting of 240°C and forgot about it. The result was that the cake burned a little from the top. Also, it was a little uneven, so I chopped off all of the crust to make it into a nice rectangle. Like plastic surgery. Then I topped it with some under-sweetened whipped cream and chemistry-laden strawberries. YUM!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY B! you almost caught up with me again 🙂
Lazy Pi 