Arcades and Chocolate

This week, it was me and Vicki at Rainbow House/ Music therapy at the government orphanages. She was doing two days at the wards, I was doing one, and then this upcoming week I will do two and she will do one. The Oasis team is doing in depth Thai lessons for two weeks in Bangkok (jealous!) because they have a budget set aside for it. So me and Vicki are taking the brunt of the work and swapping jobs. Friday however, we were both at Rainbow House, and were asked to do a cooking session with the kids.

Well, as most of you probably know, cooking/baking isn't a talent, or skill I have to really. . .teach. So Vicki and I chose something easy. . .or so we thought.

Banana pops! Yummy and simple. You take a banana, shove it on a skewer, coat it in chocolate and then add sprinkles, peanuts etc.

We bought the ingrediants and set out to prepare the chocolate. Thailand is not the best place to buy chocolate, it's quite expensive for anything familiar, so we decided to purchase cheaper Thai chocolate so that we could buy more with our 300 baht budget. We brought our load of bars to the kitchen and dumped them into a pot. We were given a time limit; the kids were going to start piling in at 10:00.

I was given the responsibility of stirring the chocolate, and started to noticed something was off after about 10 minutes. It was melting. .. kind of, but in a weird chunky, nasty, not really melty, creamy sort of way. It sort of looked like this.

Clumpy dirt.

Turns out, Thai chocolate has an anti-melting agent in it. APPARENTLY, everybody knows that except poor Vicki and Emily. The kids were already lining up to stick their bananas on their skewers, and as soon as the chocolate was out of the pot it hardened immediately. There was no way peanuts or sprinkles were going to stick to that mess, and all I could picture was all the kids eating their snack of a banana on a stick. Cool!

So I booted it and with great speed, flew to Tesco's and purchased some peanut butter mixed with nutella. Proud to say, that saved the day, and the kids loved their creations. But that moment when we realized the chocolate was not happening was a pretty stressful moment.

Cooking and I don't mix. I should just accept it now really, and make sure I marry a man who can cook.

This week Vicki and I also took a group of three boys from Rainbow House out for arcade games and ice cream! It was a lot of fun, but hectic too! As soon as we got in the taxi to leave, one of the boys, Tee, reached over and repeatedly honked the horn of the car. That pretty much sums up the night. Boys with lots of energy to spare on exhasuting Vicki and I. However, it was a good time. We had a lot of laughs, and burned many calories as we chased them from arcade to arcade.

Sombut and Mayom racing

Sombut stuffing his face

I really miss you all at home. Just being able to have contact with people I love is an awesome blessing. Simple words and comments mean more to me than you can imagine! Thanks for keeping in touch! I love you all.