This is my first blog post and I thought I would write about my experience a couple of days ago with the metric system.  Per’s daughter, Filippa, turned 12 on Thursday and I decided that I would make her a birthday cake as my gift.  As many of you know, I love to make birthday cakes…the more extravagant the better! I wanted to make Filippa a real American-style birthday cake. I had to make the cake from scratch because the Swedish store here in the countryside didn’t have a traditional American-style cake mix. The kitchen here is pretty well equipped and Eva Lotta helped me find most of the pans and ingredients I would need. I just needed to get a few more things at the store.

Bob and I walked to the store and it turned out to be a 10k round-trip excursion – whew.  Despite my aching feet, I enjoyed the beautiful walk on a small country road lined with the traditional red and white painted Swedish cottages surrounded by fields of wildflowers. Per and Eva Lotta told me that the houses are painted red because it preserves the wood against the harsh winters here.  The paint originated as a bi-product of copper mining in the 1500’s and was used by wealthy people to simulate the red brick color of affluent homes throughout the European continent. Makes sense.

Time to make the cake.  The kids had gone off to the disco party and I was going to “stealthily” bake the cake before Filippa came home. I found a recipe on the web at one of my favorite sites and luckily it had a US to Metric conversion calculator.  So, I clicked on the little button and it recalculated my recipe. Great!!!  However, as I began to pull out the measuring cups and spoons, I noticed that everything was in deciliters and not in grams as my recipe required.  Hmm, how to go from dry measurement in grams to liquid measurement in deciliters? I searched on the web for a converter and found that one cup equals 240 milliliters. But I needed grams, which is a weight measurement. So I went from grams to milligrams to milliliters to deciliters, which eventually got me to, what I think was the right amount.  There was probably a much easier way to do this and all you engineers out there can let me know. The one thing about baking is that it is a scientific process and if you don’t have all your ingredients/chemicals in the right proportion, things could go very wrong.  So at 10pm as I was pulling my cake out of the oven, I was praying it would be ok.  It looked like it had risen properly. I hope it tasted good. Oh, one other thing I had to contend with, they don’t use vanilla extract over here.  Apparently, Scandinavian’s use something called “vanilla sugar”. It looks like powered sugar and tastes kinda like vanilla.  I didn’t know how much to use so I just winged it.  Since I am STILL suffering from jet lag a bit, I got up at 4am and decorated the cake so Filippa would have a surprise in the morning.  Well, she loved it!  She was showing all of her friends on Skype. It was her first big, American birthday cake!  At the little celebration, the cake got rave reviews from all the kids and cousins -everything turned out just fine.