The Case of the Exploding Birthday Cake

My birthdays usually pass without much of a hullaballoo, and this one was really not much different.  It was pretty much just a regular day, so I decided to try an experiment.  I wanted to see if I could manage to bake a birthday cake, or at least something like it.  How about some birthday brownies?

In suit with every other part of the government I’m familiar with, the Peace Corps doesn’t skimp on published material for its volunteers.  Among the pile of reading material they gave us on the way to site, one was a book of recipes helpful when trying to learn how to cook familiar dishes with local ingredients.  It has everything from Ghanaian Red Red to bread pudding and chicken enchiladas.  I picked out an easy brownie recipe and thought I’d make some chocolate frosting as well.  Ovens are hard to come by in this country, and that makes it hard to bake anything (and I’m too lazy at the moment to build the “Peace Corps Dutch Oven”).  However, those that choose to go into business baking bread, build themselves an oven, so some exist in this town.

My friend Rebecca is one such baker.  She’s around 23 years old and already has her own thriving business.  After finishing junior high school, she went to Accra to live with an aunt because her mother could not afford, at the time, to send her to high school.  (Here, as in most developing countries, high school is not free; students must pay tuition, book fees, and because there is no high school in Damanko, boarding fees as well since they have to live there while they’re in school.)  Rather than be idle, she went to a vocational school that taught how bake bread (among other things), run a small business, and build an oven.  After finishing that, she saved for a year before coming back to Damanko and starting her own business.  She’s been baking for three years or so now, and since she’s the only one who bakes tea bread (most bakers make sugar bread as it seems to be the local favorite) she does very well.  She now makes enough money to send herself to high school, and, she hopes, after that, nursing school.  Since Damanko has no high school, all students wanting to go (and that’s a lot) get farmed out to high schools in other villages and often only come home for breaks.  It’s almost like college, really.  For much of the year Rebecca is away, so who bakes?  As with many things in this way of life, you turn to the free labor of your family.  In order for Rebecca to go to school, her mother and three younger sisters (plus one or two apprentices) must keep the bread business going.  Rebecca’s mother, Hannah, is a very jolly sort of woman and I am happy to be friends with her as well.  Hannah has her own business—she is a seamstress, so every morning she gets up at about 5 am, mixes the bread dough, and with the help of her daughters molds the loaves into the several dozen bread pans.  At about 8 am or so, she goes to her own shop to do any sewing she needs to do that day.  Some time in the afternoon, she goes back to the house to set the fire in the oven and around 5 pm, the fire is ready to put in the bread.  The oven is pretty big.  It’s made from cement and plaster in the shape of an igloo with a small hole just above the ground on one side.  In order to heat it, you put a bunch of firewood in it and burn it until they are all ash and coals.  After that about an hour, Hannah takes a long metal stick with large hook and rakes all of the coals out of the igloo, leaving all the heat inside.  Then she takes a big flat shovel at the end of a long stick to put the bread (each in their own separate pans) inside.  In about half an hour they’ve finished baking, she takes them out and puts in the next batch.  As she pulls out the bread, her daughters take it into a room in the compound, let it cool, take it out of the pans and package it up for selling.  When the baking is done, Rebecca’s sister Naomi takes the bread in the blue box to market to sell it in the evening.  Depending on the amount of bread baked and sold and whether it’s market day, the baking will take place every day or perhaps, every other day.

On the morning of my birthday, the power had gone out early in the morning, so Hannah didn’t get the bread mixed early.  The day before I had asked if I could slip my own brownies in the oven with the bread, to which she eagerly agreed.  The power outage, however, set the baking time back a bit.  The fire wasn’t ready for the bread until about 8pm, so I had a late birthday cake.  I mixed up some brownie batter before going over there and had to use some of her pans.  The ones she offered me looked like very large cupcake papers, only made from aluminum.  I filled three of them half way because I knew they would rise.  We put them on a large flat sheet and put them in the igloo-oven.  After the first batch of bread was finished we checked the brownies (which had risen considerably) and only the tops were done, so we put them back in.  This time, Hannah shoved them to the back of the oven and when we looked again, a chocolate lava flow was brewing.  There wasn’t much we could do until the rest of the bread was done since the brownies were at the back of the oven, so we just left them.  Left them spilling over into one of the other bread pans.  When we took them out, I was absolutely flabbergasted.  They had no insides.  ???????  They looked like chocolate brownie pot pies with no filling.  The tops were there, the sides stuck to the pans, but the insides were spilled all over the pans.  What the hell?  And, then for surprise #2, as soon as they cooled, they became crispy, like cookies.  So, while the third batch of bread baked, we all sat there in the dark, next to the oven, under the watchful eye of Orion, eating ruined brownie and sugar bread.  The taste of the brownies was perfectly normal, but the presentation was seriously lacking.  Everyone in the house enjoyed them, anyway.  We even chipped the biscuit-like brownie off the pan and ate the crumbs.  I took the bigger pan home for the next day, but I just decided to shrug my shoulders and then took it to Kwesi’s house and gave it to the kids there, who did an excellent job of picking it clean.  It was no Safeway cake (or Vinman’s cake—OMG my sister’s bachelorette cake was the best EVER—for more than one reason) but definitely the most laborious and disastrous cake that ever existed on my birthday.