cake cake cake

Happy Belated Mother's Day!  It's been a busy week as I'm helping my team of English students prepare for their debate competition next week (they're gonna do great!), so these Mother's Day cake photos are overdue!  

As I'm sure I have mentioned many times, my host mom is a fantastic cook.  I woke up on Saturday to the delicious aroma of freshly baked cakes, which she said she was going to prepare for the following day.  There were three huge cake rounds, and she said she was making three, so I assumed that just meant slapping on some icing and making them look nice.  Wrong.  Sunday came around, and the cousins from out of town came around, and I walked downstairs to find host mom and aunt working on a masterpiece.  They had sliced each cake round into smaller discs, and layered them in contrasting flavors.  My interest was piqued so I ran for my camera and paid careful attention!  

that's Yeny in the coral and Aunt Gina in the brown (family resemblance!)

Yeny was occupying herself with the savory meal preparation, which is not as important as cake but still important.  Potatoes for 12!

Ok so their family cake technique (I assume this isn't a secret recipe!): after laying down each layer, pour a bit of fruit juice (alternating pineapple and strawberry) over it and let it soak in, then spread cream icing, then a sweet spread (alternating strawberry, which you see here on the cake, and manjar cream, which is dulce de leche flavored and in the yellow bowl), then lay down the next layer of cake, and repeat! 

I believe there were 6 layers total, and then they covered the whole thing with whipped icing and let me decorate it!  But the beautiful cake toppled over before too long--a consequence of too many layers on too many slippery spreads.  I regret nothing, because we still ate it and it tasted beyond amazing.  This picture gives you a nice idea of how tasty but also how structurally unstable the poor thing was. And then you can see me gleefully decorating it. Lots of TLC went into this cake, people.

I ate the leftovers for days. Perfect.  Also, the next day the weather was pretty nice so my friend and I set out on a little nature hike!  We were trying to get to the top of the huge hill behind my neighborhood but we couldn't find the right path... doesn't matter though, because it was still gorgeous! 

one of the many fences we had to sneak through...

Somehow in all the cake frenzy, some cake crumbs actually got smeared onto my camera lens (without my knowledge), so all my pictures from that next day were cloudy around the edges.  Gotta figure out how to clean it off because I will be taking many more pictures this weekend! Going back to Concepcion with my host family, to visit the same cousins who came for Mother's Day.  Very excited!