Game Day!

To celebrate the end of Grade 9 exams and PERFECT (!) attendance for all the Hope Scholars in the program, we had a Game Day. We had a math relay, an English relay, and a three-legged race relay. Complete with delicious snacks and prizes.

Speaking of delicious snacks. Laura, Caroline and I took it upon ourselves to bake these beautiful children cake with sprinkles. Norton generously handed us the keys to his home, and starting early that morning, we baked. Unfortunately, Norton's oven is a state-of-the-art energy-saving model that also does not function like a normal oven and is very misleading with its little red analog display screen. So the cake batter sat there eagerly awaiting rising while the oven mocked it. For hours. Just sat there in its righteous environmental glory sticking its tongue out. When the team left to start the Game Day at 1pm, we found ourselves, all three of us, sitting side-by-side on the kitchen floor staring at that oven with our handmade icing dangling from our hair and two flat cakes sighing in the oven.

We decided we'd have to head over late. I walked to Porter House to fetch a vehicle for us, and when I returned, Caroline and Laura stood beaming in front of two cakes covered in icing, merrily sprinkling them with colored candy.
Then we got to the school and cut the cakes to find that they were literally only halfway cooked. Laura and Caroline insist that the knife came out clean when they did The Test, and they had no idea how it happened. And by the way, they said, One of the cakes was totally burnt on the top and we had to cut off the burn part so there's no way, we figured, that thing wasn't cooked. So what are you going to do?

Well, 1. We didn't have much of a choice, considering 2. These kids' hunger and expectation of food, coupled with their total despair at wasting any even remotely edible goods, and 3. We figured that the likelihood of Salmonella surviving the (eventually) hot temperatures of the oven were very slim.
So we served it anyway. Goopy.

We said it was "American Custard Cake."

And the kids - not surprisingly - loved it, loved it, loved it. Licked every last drop from the pan.