Inspired by Jonathan Carter's Cake War and Let Them Eat Cake in 2006 and as a token of appreciation to the Ubuntu community (which is also part of the larger Linux community), I asked my wife to bake us a Ubuntu cake for the Jaunty release party in Pretoria, Karoo Cattle and Land at Irene Village Mall on Saturday, 25 April. Jaunty Jackalope is the code name for Ubuntu 9.04, which was released on 23 April 2009 by Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu.I didn't plan on writing much about the event but being prompted about it on IRC at #ubuntu-za, reading drubin's blog and being asked in the comments to provide the recipe I decided to go ahead and write my own entry, even if a bit late.
So here goes.
The nice thing about recipes is that they are very much like Open Source Software. You don't have to re-invent the wheel but you can cut and paste, learn from other recipes and adapt to your own liking as you go along to fit your own needs.
For our Ubuntu cake my wife used a recipe from her school days which she thought was very much unique because her teacher had written it down and adapted it from her days as a child. The recipe was written in Afrikaans, "nogal". But the sub-title gave it away somewhat, CHIFFONKOEK, "Love-light two-egg chiffon cake". Turns out, not a lot of things in life are unique.
So in stead of retyping the recipe I decided to go search for it on the web and found an interesting page about Chiffon cakes on Wikipedia and I also found a recipe of a very similar Lovelight Chiffon Cake.
For the icing my wife used Fondant and for the Ubuntu logo we simply used a large image of the logo which we printed and used as a template.
Suffice to say, based on the turnout at the release party and comments from others and the organiser Ross Addis (chairman of the GLUG) who was very happy, it was a huge success. Definitely something we (Ubuntu-ZA) can be proud of and build on. Thank you Ross and others for organising it.
For me it was very interesting to meet some of the faces that I have only known through the interwebs on the mailing lists and on IRC.
And for those who left early. Yes it was a real cake and we did eat it in the end.
Let the cake war continue.
