Dirt Cake Mind Explosion

Celebrating Karl's Birthday

Most of the students I live with have a hard time thinking outside of the way things have always been done.  If I try to cut the watermelon the fat way instead of the long way first, my knife is taken away, and I'm shown how to do it "correctly."

I decided to challenge their ideas of brownies for my friend's birthday.  Brownies are the students' favorite dessert, so to mess with a favorite, could have been a bad idea. 

We began by baking two pans of brownies as usual, and then we made "chocolate yogurt" (a.k.a. pudding).  I don't know the real word for pudding and none of my Thai friends had any better word for it so we settled on "chocolate yogurt."  Sounds gross but tasted delicious.  Next we crushed the Thai version of Oreo cookies into dirt-sized pieces. When no one was looking, my American friend and I sneaked (I really want to write 'snuck' but I don't think it's correct) away with the brownies and pudding. 

In a room with the door closed and locked, we crumbled the brownies (how dare we do such a thing?!) and layered them with the pudding in a plastic flower pot.  The cookie dirt was sprinkled on top making it look surprisingly a lot like a pot of soil. 

Gummy worms couldn't be found, so we settled for gummy french fries.  (Who knew such a thing existed!?)  They looked enough like worms though.  To top it off, we picked a flower from a bush next to the dorm and stuck it in the middle.  

When the happy birthday song was being sung, I brought the cake out.  Laughing broke out, mouths dropped open, fingers pointed, and everyone began asking, "Is it real?" 

 

I think the cake went over alright because this is what was left after about 10 minutes, even though the brownies weren't in the pan as they should have been. 


My primary goal is to glorify God by making his name more known here in Thailand.  Sometimes that looks different than I would have guessed.  Sometimes it looks like challenging people to think outside of what they grew up thinking.  I tried this with brownies, but the same thing goes for traditional beliefs.  The step from thinking the God of the Bible is a western story to thinking He might really exist and change lives is enormous and something to celebrate.