Sibu Tales : First Chocolate Cake

My mother was not English educated and when we moved to Sibu from Pulau Kerto she was exposed to a more urban kind of lifestyle and many English speaking people both men and women.

She was also exposed to for example, a modern bakery, Kim Guan Siang, which sold many different kinds of western cakes and tinned cakes, imported from the UK. She was rather nervous about reading all the English labels. My father was very understanding and he literally made himself a shopper for my mother. He happily volunteered to do all the marketing for her but of course he was not a hen pecked husband.

An aunt who was a teacher lived with us  at the beginning of our life in Sibu. She made the first chocolate cake we ever tasted.

Soon after that my father acquired a second hand oven, New World brand, from an English officer who was leaving Sarawak. My mother was over the moon.  She tried roasting but never baking. And most of the cooking was on the stove top, although we continued to enjoy food cooked with the traditional wood fire Foochow stove.

Later when I went to secondary school, I learned how to bake and used the New World oven to the fullest but I was not allowed to bake too often because it was a luxury.

It was also during those times when we would copy recipes in a thick exercise book, or cut recipes from newspapers to make a scrap book.

I remember fondly the first cakes my sisters and I made for the Chinese New Year.

Here is an old Chocolate Cake recipe.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil or butter
1 cup cold water
2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons vinegar


Preheat oven to 375F.
Sift together flour, cocoa, baking soda, salt and sugar into a mixing bowl.
In a small bowl, measure and mix together the oil, water or coffee, and vanilla.
Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix the batter with a fork or small whisk.
When the batter is smooth, add the vinegar and stir quickly. There will be pale swirls in the batter where the baking soda and vinegar are reacting. Stir just until the vinegar is distributed evenly throughout the batter.
Pour the batter into a greased pan or muffin tins.
Bake the cake for 25 – 30 minutes (20 minutes for cupcakes).
Cool before serving.




We made three cakes, a butter cake, a chocolate cake and a coffee cake. I believe we were quite proud of ourselves. By that time our aunt had gotten married and we did not have anyone to advise us. But the cakes were "secondary school girls' standard" of course and our domestic science teacher Miss Mamora would have been very proud of us.

All secondary schools in Malaysia should teach Domestic Science or at least have a Domestic Science Club.

Furthermore,"Being Domestic" is not a lowly idea.