Broke two wooden rolling pins..

And the list of household items that have been damaged by accident in my house by me has grown to include two rolling pins.

How did I manage to break them, you may ask?

I wanted to surprise my Sensei with a special Birthday cake from his country of origin. It has many layers of pastry lined with a caramel sauce.

It looks like this:




Since I don't really know how to make this cake, and was guessing at each step, I think that I made the dough too stiff. It was quite a difficult chore to try to roll it out thinly, and as I pressed down on the rolling pins... Well.. it seems that I have much more power in my arms, and core muscles than these things were designed to take, and I popped the handles of the pins. The first rolling pin that I broke, I assumed that it was just old, and worn out, but the second rolling pin was brand new, and it broke just as quickly... sigh...

One person suggested that perhaps I may want to purchase a Marble rolling pin. It might be able to take what I can give... but I'm thinking that the structural flaw is in the design of the handles.. not in the material of the pin itself.

Wow.. it was really tough to cut that cake into pieces too! There were many students, and I needed to cut each cake into 16 pieces to have enough for everyone. I didn't realize that it would crumb all over the place, and how much downwards pressure that I'd have to put onto the knife to get through all of the layers. I totally relied on my Karate training for that moment. The cake lost the fight, and was eaten happily by the whole dojo.

I now have quite sore shoulder muscles from all of that extra training *whew*

So I wish a very Happy Birthday to my Sensei, and I promise to train harder so that next year I win the fight with the cake more quickly. :-)