Adjusting - well… trying to at least?

I baked a cake today… kind of.

I was invited to attend a lunch party at the neighbors/old family friends. Christine and Xavier have been extremely helpful to me in pursuing this dream of living in France, and it was important to me to let them know exactly how appreciative I was. But nowadays nothing is ever easy for me.

At first, I planned on giving them a bottle of wine for letting me reside in their beachside condo next week while this house is occupied. However, I have been warned that you never bring a bottle of wine to a woman’s house for a meal – here, unlike in the States, it’s improper and considered an insult, suggesting that the hostess does not know how to properly pair her drinks with her food. So there went that idea.

I thought then that it would be wonderful if I could bake them a dessert. Sure, I could just buy something, but wouldn’t it be awfully impressive if I could make something delicious from scratch! In Boston, this wouldn’t be a problem. I can make an excellent tiramisu and I know exactly where to buy the best of each ingredient. Here, on the other hand, I know nothing. (Did I mention that I already got lost coming home from the marché? And it’s at the bottom of the hill!) I spent the better part of an hour searching the store for the ingredients listed on the back of a bag of flour – all in French. One of the workers felt bad watching me walk in circles and helped me a bit, which was also a wonderful opportunity to practice French. So at least I had everything – from flour to frosting to the pan in which to cook it – to make the “meilleur gateau chocolat.”

I understood the recipe perfectly. I was proud of myself for that, too. I understood French – even the cooking terms you can’t find in a dictionary. But I didn’t understand the metric system. (Yes, I AM American – dumb and ignorant and whatnot. I realized that again today when I spent the afternoon with the company of several French men who speak five languages fluently. And I can barely stumble through two… But alas, I digress) In addition, there are no measuring tools in this house, so I had to do my best in the most ghetto way possible. I needed, for example, a quarter of a litre of crème fresh from a container that was 20cl (I’m not going to lie, I don’t even know what “cl” stands for) so I found an old bottle of water that was 1.5l and mentally divided it into six parts, then put as much crème fresh as it would take to fill one part of the bottle into the bowl in which I was mixing my ingredients. (I want you to know I’m laughing out loud at myself as I write this – it’s amazing the ridiculous concoctions one can dream up.) The recipe called for 150g of flour that I measured out by pouring a packet of 8g of sugar into a bowl (it was the only amount of anything that I knew for sure!) then pouring some flour into another bowl of the same size until both bowls contained a similar amount; I’d then dump the bowl of flour into the batter and repeat until I had – what I thought – was about 150g. The real problem was (as if I haven’t already described several) that I had a half-full box of sugar cubes and no idea how much each cube weighed and no way to find out. Donc, when the recipe called for 140g of sugar and I had no idea mentally of how much that would be, I just threw in seven cubes and crossed my fingers.

As I struggled to light the gas oven, I thought that if I successfully made this damn cake, I would be on top of the world. Seriously, the day I can cook up a delicious dessert in this French oven, following a French recipe, cooking with French ingredients, using the French measuring system, I will consider myself well adjusted to this land.

That day was not today.

Long story long, I ended up rushing to Ramatuelle to find some flowers, only to discover the fleurist was closed leaving me to purchase a very cute pot with a maple leaf on it and some vanilla soaps. With the help of the shopkeeper who took pity on me, I dressed the pot up nice with some scented paper and put the soaps and some maple syrup from home and a nicely written thank you card in it and called it a day.

So props to me for speaking lots of French today. I didn’t do so well with the language at the lunch table full of Parisians, but they were all very nice and perfectly willing to practice their English with me. No, it’s not the way to learn French, but I had a long morning, ok?!

Eh, time to have some dinner and rest up for another day at the crique tomorrow…