A friend told us that maple sugaring is native to the northeastern U.S. and that it would be a unique thing to show to our exchange student. So we went to a local park that was having a demo of maple sugaring.

A collecting bag, hanging on a tap on a sugar maple tree.

A tap. We watched our guide hammer one of these into a tree. You can see the sap that has dribbled out of this one. Normally a collecting bag would be hanging from the metal flange at the top of the tap, but the one on this tap is missing so that we could look at it.

A farther-away view of sugar maple trees with collecting bags:


This is the special stove that they boil maple syrup in.

We learned that the Native Americans used to make sap into maple sugar by collecting sap in birch bark baskets, then pouring the sap into a hollowed-out log, then spending the entire month of March repeatedly putting stones into a fire to heat up, then using a deer-antler to carry a hot stone from the fire to the log and dump it in to the sap, then using the deer-antler to scoop out the cooled-off stone and put it back into the fire again. A boiler seems much easier! This boiler is fueled, alas, by the tons of firewood left behind by the Emerald Ash Borer, which recently killed zillions of ash trees in our part of Michigan.

Arlo and Kendra trying samples of maple syrup.

Here are Arlo and Kendra at a train layout:


Here's Kendra looking at the train layout:

Kendra loves to talk about an imaginary character who she invented and named Supergirl. She told me everything about how to make this cake -- all the colors, and that Supergirl should have an orange party hat on her chest, with a blue pompom on top. And a cape. A blue cape.

This cake was for Kendra's family birthday party. The people on it are Supergirl and Superboy. Kendra told me what she wanted on her cake, and exactly what colors everything should be.

Here's the inside of Kendra's Supergirl Superboy cake.

Cool, eh?

The checkerboard is made from chocolate and vanilla cake batter, poured into the pans with a special divider that lets you position the batter in the checkerboard pattern. This was the first time I'd made a checkerboard cake that was gluten-free. I am delighted with the way it came out.

Kendra is the kid on the left. I blurred the faces of the other people in the picture, since I haven't asked permission to post their pictures on the web.

You can see the break in the horizontal bone that is supposed to go straight across the top but instead points upwards a bit like an upside-down V.