Cake Ahoy!

I have been missing the fun I used to have at home, cooking for my family – not the serious, satisfy your families hunger pangs three times a day kinda cooking, that all wives and mothers face – but the fun 'lets be creative' kinda cooking.
When the craving for chocolate cake strikes, I usually jump into action.
Well, it struck yesterday and with it struck disaster. Actually it all began last week, I was overcome with the urge to make a yummy, gooey, deep dark chocolate cake. Since I didnt have all the ingredients at home, I decided to cheat and bought a Chocolate Brownie premix on my way home from work.
I was off yesterday and was reminiscing of a book I had read as a child, in which they always had 'Cafe und Kuchen' every evening and I was determined to have the same – Coffee and Cake. Now please understand that I share my flat with three other girls and the kitchen belongs to everybody and nobody if you know what I mean. People come and go and generally dont stay for more than a year. Most of the time we eat at work (in the cafeteria) or go out for a bite. We do have a small cooking range but no-one has ever bothered to buy an oven, so that's where the problem arose: I didnt have any means to bake my cake. Being ingenious, I thought I would bake it in a pressure cooker with sand at the bottom instead of water. The cooker traps the heat and the sand acts as an insulator at the bottom, preventing the cake tin (and the cake inside it) from burning. I was pretty confident of the outcome since this is a tried and tested experiment.
So dawned the day of my great venture and it rained and it poured - and as you can imagine there wasn't any DRY sand available anywhere. “Well what the heck, I'll steam it” I thought to myself and so cheefully we began (both me and Rakhi who works as a pastry chef in Amarvilas and is one of the inmates of our appartment). I started mixing the batter and she rummaged around for a container that would be small enough to fit into the pressure cooker. In the end she just used my pocket knife to unscrew the handle of a small saucepan, and further employed herself by greasing it with butter and dusting it with flour.
Finally the batter was ready - a smooth, glossy, rich dark brown batter! Then the batter went into the pan, the water (instead of the sand) went into the cooker, the pan followed the water and the lid and the whistle topped it all off.
She then made herself a lemonade and I got myself a coffee and we both sat back to await the result. Ten minutes later I asked her, “Shouldn't we have covered the cake?”
“Nope” was her complacent reply. There we sat, sipping and chatting away, whilst the cooker whistled it's head off, begging for attention.
I turned the stove off and waited for a while for it to cool before opening it. And guess what I found out? - YES, we were supposed to cover the cake before closing the cooker. You see the steam cooked the cake sure enough, but when allowed to cool, the steam had no way of escaping and the it condensed right into the cake.
Rakhi and I couldn't stop giggling as we made an attempt at resuscitation. but the poor thing had drowned beyond hope. I tried draining the water-logged-sponge-of-a-cake. Unfortunately we had buttered and greased the pan too well, cause as I tilted it, the whole thing just slid out of the pan and back into the cooker with a glorious splash. Both of us just collapsed laughing. Trust me, I had never-ever had so much fun making a cake. We tried some repairing but it was a lost cause. So we just dumped the whole concoction and drove to the nearest movie hall to catch a show.
You know what someone just told me that we could have used gravel too instead of sand and that would be available easily and could be used even if wet ?!?!?!
Well I guess theres no harm in trying. I'll let you know how it goes this time!
WISH ME LUCK!!!