Can I be Sacagawea please?

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope the turkey-induced torpor bodes well for all of your metabolisms. Myself, I am planning on sleeping off mass quantities of boiled beef and fish balls. Yum.

Thanks to all sympathy and empathy (and flowers) elicited from my last post; I sincerely was not foraging for pity whatsoever, it just made for an entertaining story... but the kindness from all of you has not gone unnoticed.

It is currently approximately 2:53 pm on Thanksgiving day; my mother has been up since the crack of dawn preparing the ingredients for tonight's hot pot (huo guo) of which I have pontificated of yore. My offers of help were overlooked, as my cutting, slicing, and raw animal preparing skills simply do not hold a match (even with a pointer) to my mom's. However, she mentioned that dessert would be a chocolate Bundt ("you fixed it!") cake with all sorts of amendments to the recipe... my Kengs-can't-bake radar immediately wailed, loud and clear, and I politely questioned if she had tested said recipe in the past. She replied that it was a recipe from a trusted friend (who can bake) and so I relaxed.

As I turned the oven on to pre-heat, I was reminded to check it for miscellaneous objects, since in the Keng household, our oven has always been used as extra storage space. There were indeed several foil pans happily heating, but luckily no plastic plates that melted into the heating coils like *last* time... The cake was dutifully measured, mixed, and meted out into said Bundt pan (I'm sorry, but I just hate Bundt pans) and put into the oven. Three minutes later Mama Keng came screaming back into the kitchen, something about forgetting the raisins and the walnuts... I obediently removed the cake pan from the oven (gingerly, as my burns are still healing) and added handfuls of raisins from the Costco-sized bag and she chopped up the walnuts. As I was putting the cake back into the oven she exclaimed "I have LOTS of raisins!!" (c'mon, you know it's coming: "it's got raisins in it... you like raisins!") and approached said Bundt pan menacingly with two enormous handfuls. I mercifully prevented the addition, reminding her "less is more" (thanks Cabeza, for that baking tip) to which she responded "Chinese say more is better!!" We compromised by allowing her to throw in a token five extra raisins.

She then triumphantly pulled out some baking chocolate that is who-knows-how old and announced she was going to melt it and then make chocolate glaze... then turned to me and asked "so how you make chocolate melt?" I patiently explained, as far as I knew, the best way was to put it in a pan in another pan of water, double boiler style... right? I'm only going off of secondhand information from my culinary cohorts. Since the chocolate was unsweetened, I did a quick Internet research to see what else was needed. Powdered sugar, butter, and corn syrup. I went back into the kitchen and asked (knowing the answer): "Mom, do you have any corn syrup?" to which she blankly stared and replied "I have maple syrup. Is that the same?"

At least she didn't ask to substitute molasses.

I am truly my mother's daughter. It is genetic. And I'll let you know how it turns out.