Great Expectations

As I wrote last year at this same exact time:
“This was the week that the three weeks of orientation (yes, I know we must be the most and best oriented school on the planet!) finally melted into the first week of school. That day that is the joy of joys!

But before we get into blogisodes about the new school year, I want to dwell for a moment on this year’s orientation. We went from orientation for senior staff, department heads, new faculty, returning faculty, student proctors in the dorms, new students and finally, returning students. Whew! But the other day came one of the most fun things I have done in our time here at KA. Julianne, the intrepid and fearless Dean of Students wanted to foment a little inter-dorm competition as we got set for school. She came up with the idea of “Madaba Games,” an Olympics-style competition that would accrue points for the top 3-placing dorms in a variety of competitions. Not just physical competition, although there would be that, she came up with a science competition in the form of a Project Egg Drop, and a crazy hair-styling competition, and an art competition and skit competition and music competition and a bake-off competition.”


So that was from last September…since we had already done it one time, well, of course the Madaba Games are already a time-honored, time-worn tradition! The hooting and hollering and desire on the part of Dorm Nihal—we were second last year—to try and best perennial champion Meissa House…it was exciting.

So this year the bake-off was to be a Cupcake Competition. Last year was so much fun, and about half my team this year was from last year’s outstanding Chocolate Chip Cookie team. We were ready to spend three hours creating the most spectacular cupcakes Jordan had ever seen. Just like last year, we first studied the criteria by which we would be judged—four points, (1) Taste (2) Texture (3) Presentation and (4) a WOW factor. The other interesting thing is how many points the bake-off counts in the overall Madaba Olympic Games—they count as much as all the sports competitions combined! Well, we weren’t too worried since last year we earned the Silver Medal. This year—the gold was practically within our grasp!

The bloom was off our rosy plans though as we pondered where to start…last year was a little easier since “Chocolate Chip Cookie Bake-Off” really means exactly that. Now with the only criterion that they are cupcakes, well, we spent over half an hour debating what flavor to try. I suggested something different like Orange, or Spice Cake, but we couldn’t come to consensus. So I went to Food.com again and found something intriguing—a “Chocolate Coca-Cola Cake” made at the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain. The guys liked this since it had an unusual twist—they kept wondering if the Coca-Cola part might be the WOW factor we needed. One of the boys ran downstairs to another faculty apartment to get some cans of Coca-Cola.

We created teams for the baking and pretty quickly a new student Ahmed emerged as a leader. In a wonderful moment of serendipity he announced that his American passport lists his family name as “Baker.” (In his Jordanian passport it is similar but it has ‘Abu’ in front of it and an extra ‘h’ in there. How great to have a Baker act as our Head Baker. Ahmed also explained to the non-scientist (that would be me) how the Coca-Cola and baking soda would act in the chemistry of the cake and create a special texture.

We were off and going! Uh-oh…we didn’t have buttermilk needed, but no problem. I showed the guys how to make a buttermilk substitute with regular milk and lemon juice. As we got to the end of the recipe, a few more gulps—we didn’t have several of the ingredients to make the really interesting chocolate fudge frosting. We were gonna just have the cupcakes. We scoured the refrigerator and pantry to see how we could make a frosting that we would help us out with the WOW factor.

At this point we started to go into overdrive about the presentation. Remember last year we had team member Mohammed Attar in a tux shaving fancy chocolate over the perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies in a Nihal-orange Hermes box. So as the first batch baked we brainstormed about the presentation. Should we sculpt a Camel out of cupcakes? Should we make the map of Jordan with the cupcakes? We got nervous since no idea made all of us excited.

Ahmed decided we should create a Domino game out of cupcakes. Let’s make a white angel food cake and contrast that with the Chocolate Coca-Cola cupcakes. As we got out the eggs and started on another cake recipe, Ahmed explained his idea. This guy has obviously watched “The Cake Boss” from the US—yes, indeed, he does watch the show. Ahmed wanted to make rectangular cakes from the dark and the white recipes, cut them into strips, make a game board of alternating colors, and then turn the cupcakes into domino pieces.

The whole team wasn’t sure it would work. Ahmed is busy showing everyone his technique for separating eggs (very elaborate with a pinhole in the egg and shaking out the white!) and we are debating the plans. As the voices died down, someone always said, “So what is our plan?” The voices crescendo, and then: rinse and repeat. “So what is our plan?”

Walid and David are trying to nail down what the plan is. Bryan has gotten a little bored with the lack of a plan so he has taken a seat and is paging through an art history book. Mohammed has made himself useful and started to wash the dishes. You wouldn’t believe how many bowls and pans and utensils got used in the making of the two recipes!

Ahmed wonders if we should have another back-up cake and plan. “So what is our plan?”

Hamza takes one of the cupcakes, sticks a fork in the un-frosted top and says, “Maybe that should be our presentation. We have no plan.” Oh, my…darkness before the dawn business. Hamza is getting a little edgy. He says, “We should have won last year. Make sure we win next year.” Is the ship of dreams going down? Is this how Michael Phelps felt when he did not win every single gold medal?????

While others are distracted, giving up, washing dishes, milling about the apartment and the hallway, Ahmed remains undeterred. He announced that we should try and make a cream cheese frosting although we have no confectioner’s sugar. He wants to experiment. He finds a packet of “Wonder Whip” and decides we need to make this whipped cream. He gets out the hand mixer, accidentally spills an expensive bottle of vanilla, and there are shouts about the plans again. What is the presentation????

So Ahmed takes over and says the domino board might be too hard, but what about creating a geometric presentation: he would cut the rectangle into squares—wait the white cake rectangle, and then cut out a circle from that square, and then nestle the dark chocolate coca-cola cupcakes into that opening in that white square. Then he would slather the dark cupcakes with the whipped cream (the cream cheese frosting experiment lay abandoned now). Ahmed found mint cookies and vanilla wafers in my freezer and practiced crumbling them to see what the effect was.

“So what is our plan?” resounded again. Well, we got out the silver tray from last year and thought about it. What was the WOW factor? Ahmed seemed a little miffed since it seemed obvious to him that the WOW was the geometry and the dark/white contrast. As we thought, someone—it might have been me, I can’t recall—suggested that our cupcake offering represented the Five Guiding Principles of KA. Bryan noted that the bakers came from 3 different continents so that has the Global Citizenship thing going. Walid started to write down the ideas of how the cupcake bake-off reflected those Five Guiding Principles—we actually baked them into the cupcakes!

Working on this restored the fun mood. We now had only a short amount of time left. We elected David to read the speech about how this humble bake-off embodied and celebrated the Five Guiding Principles of this school…and decided that he should look like one of the guys from “Animal House” in a grungy bathrobe as he read his speech.

We also ate the cast-off rectangle cake of the Chocolate Coca-Cola cake.

We get to the competition and check the screen and notice that Nihal, our dorm, was in first place. In all the sports except Volleyball we had come in first. We are last to present our cupcakes to the judges. David’s speech rings through the auditorium with Lincoln-esque fervor. As the judges leave to deliberate, my friend Mazen said to me, “That was really good, John.” Thumbs up from a judge!

How does it come out? As I wrote last year in that blogisode, “Oh dear reader, it is not quite the climax of the movie that I envisioned.”

We didn’t even place. Hamza repeated to me what he had said earlier: “Make sure we win next year.” Hamza is a senior so he won’t be here, but he cared enough about this. Oh well, we had fun, again, and evidently, according to one judge, Cassie’s cupcakes she made for her dorm were 1000% better than everything else.

As it turns out, our lack of points in the end did not hurt Nihal. The dorm skit put us over the top and we emerged the victors in the 2nd Annual Madaba Games. Wonder what next year the competition should be?