Queque (keh keh)

The last Friday morning of every month, the executive staff sends their kitchen assistant to the Hildegard Pastelería y Salón de Té, a German bakery and Tea House, for their special cakes.

And then....once a month Jacobs sponsors the Birthday cakes!  Welcome to South America....we have NOTHING like this in the U.S., at least not for any company that I have ever worked for.

The popular cake on the left is called the "Sophia Loren." It is very similar to the "Italian Cream" that my mother makes at Christmas, but it has a lot of sliced almonds as well. The cake in the center, which is hard to see, is a German specialty layered streusel/cake...with black cherries, a phyllo style center and a carrot cake bottom.

The cake on the right was very light with some type of maís de morado pudding between the layers....

ALL of them were slathered in a whipped cream frosting. Very rich...

They call her the "cake lady". She wears a blue, Jacobs Engineering servant uniform every day to work. She has a number of duties, but her primary duty is to make sure that every executive in the "Gerencia" has fresh coffee.
AGAIN....I have never seen this function in the U.S.  When I was 18 and out of high school, I worked for the Commander in Charge of Construction at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station and was asked to make coffee on my first day...so I filled the perculator full every morning for a couple of days. Nobody asked me to make it again!