"Handmade*" Cake

When I found myself with the grandkids on a Thursday afternoon, I decided to "kill two birds with one stone" and do some of my Shabbat preparations with them. I also loved the idea of baking in my daughter's nice big oven. So we made cakes.

I used my fantastically easy no-fail basic cake recipe to which I added chocolate chips.

The youngest of that crew was very enthusiastic about helping, so I took advantage of the opportunity. We also did some basic math in English, since there are lots of numbers when baking cakes:

"We need 10 half-cups of flour. Two were from the now finished bag of flour, so how many more do we add from the full bag of flour?"

Even though the Second Grade had started barely a week before, she could calculate it all in her head. NO FINGERS!

We made 4 1/2 cakes. And I guessed the temperature correctly. If there's a dial, cakes generally do well when the dial almost points directly down, just slightly cooler. The "display" showed it as 270 degrees centigrade. Then I double-checked by googling on my phone. The numbers on my oven haven't been visible for years.

When the cakes were finished, we served the small one as a treat to all the kids. I just had a couple of "crumbs" to sample. Calories! Even though, rather inexplicably, most of those grandkids aren't noshers, it's hard to resist a cake straight out of the oven.

Once the cakes had cooled sufficiently, I packed up three, leaving my daughter one for Shabbat. The grandkids reported that the visit was fun.

Why is this post titled "Handmade*" Cake? Very simple. My granddaughter had never heard of mixing a cake by hand before. She called it "handmade." My daughter uses a mixer, and I don't. Of course, you can certainly mix the cake batter with an electric mixer, but I haven't had a functioning mixer for decades. It's just another thing to wash after baking, so I'm not interested. This one-bowl cake comes out perfectly fine when mixed by hand.

Confusing Kashrut Labeling

*I got more information. Please read at the end of the post.

When I was shopping the other day for supplies for my TNT family favorite 1, 2, 3 Chocolate Chip Cookies, I almost bought these chocolate chips, because I was attracted to the 60% chocolate.  

But then I looked at the ingredients, and it said חלב milk, even though it also said פרווה Parve, which means no milk/no meat/poultry= good for all sorts of meals. I asked a few people how it could say it has milk if it's parve. Finally, a neighbor read it all very carefully and said that the chocolate chips were produced on machinery that also handles dairy products, so not everyone will consider it truly parve. But she wasn't correct either.

Because apparently, the "milk" notice has nothing to do with kashrut according to someone who was able to discover what it is:

... the notice is for allergy purposes, and the warning is to prevent any lawsuit against the company. The picture does not even show the ingredients, the picture is of the allergy warning. The warning states that it may contain milk but stipulates clearly that it is run on a dedicated parve line only. Basically it is a health statement, not a kashrut statement.