Farewell Rainbow Cake

A friend from our Church is going to England as an exchange student for six months - leaving today, actually!  So I was asked to bake a farewell cake for her at our youth group.  It was the first time I had done a farewell cake, so I hit google to try and find out which design to do.  In the end, this was what I ended up with....

Making the cakes:  I decided to make a rainbow cake.  Well, actually, everyone else decided that I should make a rainbow cake.  I was feeling tired and not too well, so I didn't feel like putting in the effort for a rainbow, so I went searching online for an easier way to make them.  I had made two different types of rainbow cakes before:  the first method is to place all your coloured batter in separate Ziploc bags, snip off the end, and put a drizzle in the bottom of the pan.  Then get the next colour, and repeat.  Continue until all the batter is used up.  This makes the cake come out in little stripes, like in the middle of this cake:

 The other method is to bake the cakes all separately and join them with together with icing later.  Although both methods work well, they are time consuming and I didn't have a lot of that.  So instead, I coloured each cake and poured them into the pan on top of each other, hoping that it wouldn't come out a nasty brown. 

These were my colours:  (I have seemed to lost one of the photos, there were 5 colours...  )

I poured the mixture in on top of each other.  And then tapped the pan several times on the bench to get rid of any air bubbles.  It took a loooong time to cook, and I probably had too much mixture in the pan, but anyways! 

 This is the mixture poured in - and then I swirled it just a little with a knife before cooking it (Right)





And this is after it is cooked: (I cut it open to fill it with icing and also to see how it worked out.)  I was happy - and relieved! - with the results.

 For the icing, I decided to try something new, as you do when you are cooking a cake for a event! :P I read that adding copha to the icing would make it set harder crust better to get a nicer finish.  I had to leave the copha out in the sun for about 9 hours before it was soft enough to be beaten up.  Here is the recipe:

It makes quite a lot of icing, well and truly enough to this cake, and I put a lot on!

Ingredients: 
500g butter
250g copha
1kg icing mixture
Splash of milk

Method:
Beat butter and copha together until fluffy and white.  Add icing mixture and beat well, scraping down the sides regularly.  Add milk if it needs to be a little thinner.  

Then I iced the cake blue, cut out fondant countries, and made a little plane.  I didn't get photos of the process, but here is the finished product: (the lighting isn't great, but by the end I really couldn't care less if the photos came out well :P)

Dots on a Page

I have been thinking lately about one awesome aspect of our God:  He has our best interests at heart.

I know that is a highly spoken of topic, and so probably comes as no great surprise to any of you.  But, stop and think about it this way....there are over 7.3 billion people in this world, to get a picture of exactly how many 7.3 billion people are, please take a quick look at this link:

http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/population/world/seven-billion-plus/

Isn't that an amazing website!?! And now visualize each one of those dots as a person, someone with dreams, someone with hopes, someone with love, and someone with the need for God.  And imagine one of those dots as you. 

We are getting a picture here of how insignificant we really are.  When we were reduced to just a dot on a page, we become small, not noteworthy, and just another number. 

But thank God, we are not just another number.  We know how complicated we are, what our hopes and dreams are, and how the part we have to play in this life is not unworthy...but God knows us more than we even know ourselves.  And He has our best interests at heart. 

Now choose another dot on the page.  That person - wherever they be, whomever they are - is loved by God and their best interests are on God's heart. 

Another dot; another person, another valuable being, another who God has the best planned for.

Move down ten lines and twenty across. That dot too, represents a person who God loves, whose best interests are closest to His heart.

And the it goes on and on and on!  How awesome is our God!  Not only does He love each and every one of us, but He has the blueprint to the perfect life for us, ready for us to reach out and accept His guiding and promises.  And He does it all without compromising anybody else.  

Often, with our human limitations, we prioritized something at the expense of another.  We cannot attend to everything all at once, do everything to the best of our ability, and achieve the highest.  We simply can't.  So we choose, we decide that in order for this to thrive, this idea, dream, or project, will have to either be put on the back burner or left all together.  And that is not a bad thing.  We have to prioritse God's will in our lives and foucs on only what He has for us.

But God doesn't have to make that choice.  He doesn't have to sacrifice the person down the street's best because it is more important that you get the opportunity.  He doesn't prevent us from achieving the best, because the person sitting next to us in church deserves it more.  No, rather He has everybody's best interests at heart so that what is best for you is for you, and what is best for our friend is best for them.

To sum it up: God hasn't forgotten you.  He holds you close to His heart, and he wants the best for you.  But He hasn't forgotten the other 7,000,000,299 people in this world either.  He holds them close and wants the best for them as well.  So we have to trust in Him.  Trust that He knows what He is doing.  Trust that He knows best for you, for your neighbor, and for your friends and family. 

~ 

I know it has been a long time since I have posted anything - so I am just letting you know that I am still alive.  :)  I hope to update soon with things I have been doing, trips to Tahlee, Church, TESOL, etc. etc.  However, this was on my heart, so got typed up first.  Hoped it blessed you today.  <3