8/99: Catalan pinch cake: The day the tornado hit

Yesterday morning I was woken up with my housemates jumping in the bed with me.  I'm lucky because not only do I have a queen sized bed, but it's in the basement of the house.  While the rest of the world was crouched in closets because of the twister that was in our area, we got to go back to bed.

Sadly this continued to be the theme all day long. Go in the basement, come out, go back in the basement, run to make dinner, run back to the basement, and thus the trend continues from about 3:30 to 11:30 pm.

Thankfully we didn't loose power until about 9 last night.  The tornadoes were flying through but our little house held it's own.  The bad news is that I got too optimistic around 7:45 and decided to make the next cake.

Meet the Catalan pinch cake:

I was not too excited about making this cake because it didn't look exciting or super challenging (i tend to like the challenging ones). It has no icing and is almost considered a bread.  But the whole thing ended up being an utter fail because 8 minutes through baking time, WE LOST POWER.

Needless to say, I was not happy. The girls were all downstairs huddled in the basement and there I was upstairs with tornadoes blowing around, angry at the oven for not finishing my cake.

I decided to let it stay in the oven and see how much more it would bake.  I finally saw it this morning when I took it out of the oven.  It did bake pretty much through but definitely not all the way. It's really sticky and the consistency looks terrible.

I think what made me the most mad about this cake (aside from the power issue) is that it took so long to make. It's really sneaky like that. You think it'll just be a simply-whip-it-together cake but oh no, this cake wants you to  mix six eggs together and add it to the batter two tablespoons at a time and beat for two minutes between each addition.  So after thirty minutes of staring at eggs whirling around in the mixture, i was happy that it was finally ready to be baked.

What made me super happy about this cake is that I got to use my food processor.  It works so well and made everything smell like almond heaven.

But the cake failure is the least of everything that's going on right now.

In case you haven't seen the news (and honestly, if you haven't, what planet are you living on?), there were over 150 tornadoes that touched down across the US last night.  Our area got hit bad. Real bad.

Down in Ringgold, everything is just gone. It is a nightmare. They won't allow anyone into the town because there are still bodies in the rubble that have not been dug out or identified. Here's a picture that a friend of mine who lives in Ringgold took this afternoon while she was walking around:

Here's some pictures I took this afternoon:

The death toll is up to 300 now. There are so many stories of death and even more of destruction. Pray for Ringgold. Pray for Tuscaloosa.