"cake" rhymes with "headache"

I thought it would be a pretty easy task.
Bake a cake. I’ve done it a million times.
But baking a cake in Africa is a whole new ball game
I set my oven to 190C, and was sure to use the upper heating element in my oven. It works better.
I mixed together all of the ingredients like I’d seen my mother do a hundred times.
I greased the pans well, poured in the batter and placed them on the middle rack in the oven.
After 25 minutes the dinger rang and I checked them with a toothpick.
They were very high, but runny all throughout.
What the heck?
Well there were two problems. One, the upper heating element was going out so the oven wasn’t even hot! It was just kinda warming the batter at 50C instead of baking it at 190.
Crap.
The other problem was that I’d forgotten that the flour here is not all purpose flour but self rising flour. So when you add soda to that, it makes it rise super high. (I know you are thinking that is a good thing but it’s not. Read on)
So I decide, okay I’ll turn on the lower heating element and bake it some more.
But now as it begins to heat, the batter continues to rise and now it is overflowing over the pans and onto the hot heating elements on the bottom. There are chocolaty stalactites forming on the pans, pools of chocolate on the bottom of the oven and black smoke is pouring forth from the oven and up rising up into my bedroom.
Double Crap.
So I quickly turn off the bottom element. I’ll turn the top on again, but this time turn it up really high so it reaches 190C.
That sounds like another great idea. I can’t believe how clever I am in a crisis. But the problem is now that the cakes have fallen from their great heights and the super high heat from the element has only succeeded in broiling the cakes.
I was so frustrated I threw them out. But that didn’t’ change the fact that Kristen, Greg, Sarah and Jesse were coming for dinner the next night and I needed a desert.
So the next day I bought cake flour, more soda, and made a second attempt.
But this time I’d run out of sugar.
After a quick trip to the girl’s house, I was in business. I finagled the over right to bake everything nicely.
Happiness at last…until I tried to turn them out. Turns out my cake pans are a bunch of crap and the cakes stuck like mad! I had to literally pry them out with a spatula. I stacked them up and proceeded to try and ice them
Have you ever seen that movie The Hours, where Julianne Moore pretty much has a break down because she is trying to ice a cake and feels like a failure as a woman when she can’t do it? Yeah, that was me! The whole thing was crumbling, and sagging. I pretty much said, “Screw it” and adopted my dad’s frosting technique that resembled spackling more than icing. Lift it, and shove some frosting in between the cracks. A hole? Fill it up and smooth it out.
So in the end of my 2 day ordeal I ended up with one very ugly delicious spackled cake.
But it was a hit with my dinner guests, and the story is one to retell again and again.