Sister Davis tried to think of another title for this blog but there isn't any help for it. This post is about a cake. The post should be focused on Latvia's Seminary & Institute (S&I) Graduation. That should be the important thing for S&I missionaries, right? But somehow the graduation ceremony came in "second fiddle" to the cake.
"How can that be?"you ask. Well, this is how it all happened.
Sweet Noemi was in charge of Latvia's S&I graduation and she wanted to make it extra special. So like any normal LDS woman wanting to make an event special, she went online and found this picture of a cake...
And the idea, once in her head, wouldn't go away. Having never made a chocolate cake, she asked Sister Davis for a recipe....she was thrilled that our chocolate cake recipe only takes two eggs. Big cake pans are a rarity in Latvia. All the cakes in stores are small 8" round ones, so to get a big sheet cake that was going to take a little creativity.
And that is why Noemi made three 13x9" chocolate cakes Saturday night. You see, E/S Davis were in Estonia and wouldn't be back to Riga until Saturday night. We still had to make cookies for S&I graduation so Noemi was in charge of that cake. But it still needed decorating....
Early Sunday morning, we picked up Noemi and her three cakes and brought them all back to our apartment. Two cakes went side by side on a foil covered pizza box. The other cake was sliced carefully down the middle using a long piece of thread. With whipped cream & strawberry filler, the two sliced pieces were put on top of the two cakes and now we had a long, tall cake.
After chocolate frosting was made it was time to start decorating....frost the cake, put strawberries along the edges, then chocolate mints on the sides (there were no thin chocolate bars in any of the stores) and a white ribbon around the sides to keep the chocolate from falling over.
We showed Noemi how you can use an envelope to make a decorating bag & fill it with white icing. She had never done anything like this and was so EXCITED! Cut the corner off the envelope and you can write whatever you want on the cake.
She wrote the words in Latvian with a toothpick, so she could go over them with the icing.
And voila! The finished product. Pretty amazing for someone who had never decorated a cake before!
But now how to get that cake to the church? The pizza box was flimsy so Elder Davis scavenged around the apartment and found a big board to put the whole thing on. When we tried to get the cake into our tiny elevator we quickly realized, it wasn't going to fit! Okay, Plan B...down four flights of stairs. And Noemi? She says, "This is SO exciting!"
"Wait, is that hangman?" Yes, but that is RUSSIAN hangman...they had a completely different alphabet...
Our sacrament meeting was moved to the third hour so we could have S& I graduation right afterwards. All the talks were on the importance of scriptures and Seminary & Institute classes. Two talks were translated into English, one was given in English and translated into Latvian and Russian and one was translated into Russian. It became so confusing, Elder Davis took his headphones out and didn't even try to figure out who was talking about what...
Below, the Institute and Seminary students are getting their certificates of achievement... we are super proud of them. President Birkenfeld is reading a list of names while Pres. Kovalevskys shakes each persons hand and congratulates them.
R-L: Antti, Martins, Pres. Koval., Rudolfs, Christine, Marta, Sintija, Julia, Uvgenis, Ingus, Matis
And then it was time for that cake! Rihard is helping by putting candies around the cake...like it needs ANY more decoration!
And then the crowd hit! And the compliments on that cake came right and left...many assumed that Sister Davis had made the cake but she quickly corrected them...this cake was all Noemi's doing. We just hope she doesn't get asked to do every cake for every church function from now on...because everyone just found out, her cake was SCRUMPTIOUS!
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