how to bake a cake (in an african village)

You will need:

2 cups sugar

4 eggs

1 cup milk

2 cups all-purpose flour

½ cup butter

1 tsp vanilla

Patience

Instructions: 

Take a deep breath. This might take a while.

The process begins the next time you go to a town with over 10,000 residents. You must find the only store that sells such western luxuries as shampoo and chocolate and buy some baking powder, creepy-never-goes-bad-on-the-shelf-no-matter-how-hot-your-house-is margarine (“Blueband”), and very chemical tasting vanilla “flavouring”. You will be tempted to buy powdered milk. Don’t. It costs more than you make in a day with your volunteer stipend.  (Unless it’s the dry season and none of the village animals are getting enough nutrition to produce milk, in which case go ahead and buy the powdered milk.)  

When you get back home, make sure you have enough charcoal. If you don’t, find the nearest child who is inexplicably but not unexpectedly at home in the middle of the day on a Wednesday. Ask the kid to go down to the road for you and stop one of the guys who rides by every few hours on his bike, selling charcoal. When you hear the child screaming “MKAA!! MKAA!!” it is time to run down to the road to help the man carry the large bag of charcoal up to your house. After he puts the charcoal down, suddenly realize that you should have agreed on a price beforehand. Barter futilely for a few minutes before paying him 10,000 shillings (even though you know your neighbor only paid 8,000 last week).

If your cell phone is charged, look at the time. If not, look at the sun. If the sun is already near the top of the mountain, you don’t have time to bake a cake today. Give the charcoal-finding kid a sticker for her hard work, find a neighbor to feed you dinner, and wait till the morning to try again.

In the morning, walk half a mile to find the Mama who owns a dairy cow (complements of Heifer International—www.heifer.org ) and ask if you can buy half a liter of milk. The cow may be sick, in which case you’ll have to go to another family’s house to see if you can buy some of their goat’s milk. It’s likely they’ve already sold today’s milk in advance. In this case, put in an order for the next morning. If you don’t have anything else to do that day, stick around, drink some chai, eat some ugali, and play with the kids. You might get the goat’s milk for free the next day.

Once you have acquired milk, start hunting for eggs. Four is a lot, so you may need to hit up a few chicken-owning houses before you get enough. Make sure to test them all before you buy them—don’t buy the ones that float. While wandering around searching for eggs, stop by the store to buy a kilo of flour and sugar.

When you’ve finally got three eggs, you may find yourself in the situation where the last available egg in the vicinity has not quite yet been laid. In this case, gratefully accept a cup of cardamom, clove, and cinnamon-spiced chai and prepare to make small talk while the chicken balks and prepares to relieve itself of your cake ingredient.

Once the final egg has been lain and purchased (try not to think too hard about it as you are handed the still-body-temperature egg), head home and prepare to light your charcoal stove. If there are any kids nearby, ask them to help you collect “taka-taka”—farm waste—to use as kindling. When the kids aren’t looking, pour some kerosene on top of the kindling. The kids would make fun of you because they consider using kerosene to start a fire serious cheating, besides wasting valuable lamp fuel. No matter what you do, do not let the children find out that you’re baking a cake. Tell them you’re cooking ugali (corn mush, the staple carb here) if they ask (they will ask).  

Once you have a fire roaring, mix the ingredients together and put them in a small greased pot. Take a slightly larger pot and place three rocks in the bottom. Place the small pot inside the big pot, cover the big pot, and put a little more than half the charcoal on top of the cover. You’ve just (sort of) made an oven!  Don't forget to lick the bowl--raw eggs be damned. This is no time to be wasting precious food. 

As you wait for your cake to bake, assess your water situation. Do you have enough water to do dishes? If not, find a kid to fetch you some water from the hand-dug well about a kilometer away.  Reward her with an extra-big sticker and make a mental note to give her a piece of cake later.

Check on the cake often to make any adjustments necessary to your oven-ish-thing.

When it’s done, let the cake cool off while you put on some drinking water to boil (can’t waste those hot coals!). Remind yourself that, even though it’s kind of foggy and brown, whatever bugs in there are plotting to hurt you are about to be destroyed by the wonder of heat. If you haven’t already decided what to do with the cake (eating it all by yourself is a totally legitimate option), try to remember if any of the neighbors have had babies or other cake-deserving life events lately. If not, share it with the neighbor with the fewest kids—bigger servings for the grown-ups.   

As the last of the sugary goodness melts on your tongue and the sun begins to slip back behind the mountain marking the end of a day entirely spent in pursuit of cake, it’s ok to feel incredibly accomplished. Your cake may not change the world, but it will make it a little sweeter.