Baking a cake

Some things are complicated to accomplish in Uganda- baking turns out to be one of them. A few weeks ago, I bought some

cake at a local bakery for a birthday celebration. The cake I purchased looked

enticing. The pieces were put in a black plastic bag and I brought them home, taking care not to smash the cake. On setting down the bag at home, however, I realized that my care was unnecessary since the cake was likely about three weeks old and similar to balsa wood in consistency. Since I would never again buy anything from a bakery shameless enough to sell that cake, I started planning on finding my own means of p

roducing the next birthday cake. People here do not own ovens, however, and all cooking is done on either gas rings or charcoal. I experimented with a steamed pineapple upside down cake- not bad but a little rubbery in consistency. My initial plans for an outdoor oven were inspired by google and links sent by family and friends- I learned the appropriate internal dimensions, the right thickness of the walls, and the insistence that the door be exactly 63% of the internal height. Had I had a local Home Depot, I suspect that I would have followed this advice. However- this is not the case. I enlisted the groundskeeper, Geravase, to help me after scrounging in hardware stores failed to yield any materials I could use and after hearing that he knew how to build a kiln for bricks, which sounded pretty similar to an oven. Since neither of us seemed able to communicate our vision, though, we decided to just buy some bricks and work out the building process after. So on Saturday morning we walked to a side street where the hill had been dug out for clay and there were a number of kilns with piles of bricks. We bought the 60 bricks that Geravase estimated we would need ($3) but were then faced with the problem of how to get them back the 1 mile uphill road to the house. To avoid the expense of hiring a car ($4.50), he found a man with a wheelbarrow and we haggled over a price for transport ($3). Unfortunately, a) only 30 bricks would fit in the wheelbarrow at one time and b) the weight of even 30 of these bricks was great enough that the strong wheelbarrow owner couldn’t push it. Since Geravase stayed behind to guard our bricks, this left me to pull the wheelbarrow by a rope while he pushed it. We did eventually get all the bricks home with considerable sweat and strain. Once there, we were left with trying to figure out how to build the oven with the 60 bricks we had (a negotiated process since everyone had a different idea- by the way the 63% rule was tossed) as it was unthinkable to go back for more. The results are pictured. We tried it out on Sunday using charcoal and baking a chocolate cake (which baked in about 10 minutes with the bottom burned but was actually pretty good after I sawed off the bottom) and a shepherd’s pie. I am committed to becoming a master.