We celebrated two office birthdays this afternoon with cake. Like most non-Egyptian sweets in Cairo, the cake was both enormous and not very good. If you've ever wiped up spilled chocolate milk with a sponge and then eaten the sponge, you have a pretty good idea of how it tasted. If you've ever had a nightmare in which you're an 18th century French aristocrat fleeing murderous peasants in your elaborate and overgrown garden, you have an idea of what the cake looked like, especially if there's sliced kiwi all over your garden.
For my birthday, I am going to demand something a little more authentic, like the above Sphinx cake.
