Learn English with the News: “Cake!”

Good morning lovely people!

Everyone loves cake, so this Monday we will be talking about a huge one made in Bolivia!

To learn with this lesson, please follow these 3 steps:

1. Read the text
2. Understand the vocabulary
3. Watch the video

Text

Eighty-five bakers in La Paz are combining 11,000 eggs and hundreds of kilograms of flour, cocoa and sugar to build a cake of monumental proportions. Their inspiration? Mount Illimani, which towers over Bolivia’s capital city. And it was all hands on deck for the students and staff of Bolivia’s Gourmet Gastronomy Institute who worked in shifts for a week to get the job done.

Student Lourdes Garcia says it’s a labor of love.

– Right now we are making the dulce de leche filling for South America’s biggest cake. We are filling it with dulce de leche which goes with the cake. We are using 300 liters (80 ounces) of milk. It is hard work, but we do it with love.

Believe it or not, this cake falls short of the Guinness World Record. The world’s biggest cake was baked in India and was a towering 103 feet tall — that’s 31 meters. But Bolivians are proudly proclaiming it South America’s largest cake, serving up its 10,000 slices for the 203rd anniversary of the liberation of La Paz.

Vocabulary

Monumental – very great or extreme.

Towers – to be much taller than something else.

Hands on deck – something that you say when everyone’s help is needed, especially to do a lot of work in a short amount of time.

Dulce de leche – a very popular South American sweet, translated as “candy of milk”

Filling – a food mixture that is used to fill something (such as pastry or a sandwich).

Falls short – to fail to be as good or successful as expected or hoped for.

Video