CAKESPLOSION!

The day after Valentine’s Day festivities and all was quiet. Sugar highs had descended into the painful headaches that make the revelers slightly lackadaisical and not on guard. No one in Bertoua was ready for the sudden lava-flow that was hot, sugary and overwhelmingly full of baking powder. Car expodes. Train derailment.

This is basically the movie trailer of what happened to me when I came home today. I came home from a lovely dinner with Patti, Grace and Marie at Secret Fish Place and walked over to my neighbor/friend/mother/sister’s house only to see the kitchen table covered with cake-baking preparatory materials. I was immediately put to work beating egg whites into a froth (which, I am notably still doing with the aid of Philo’s daughter Cecile). She had been conscripted into baking FIVE or SIX cakes for her friend. Each cake involves six eggs, a huge amount of sugar, oil, vanilla, flour, and an entire packet of baking powder.

The last ingredient was not something I realized was going into the cakes until after I heard a commotion in the kitchen walked in to see the cake running over the side of the bundt pan that Philo was using to make her packets. This resulted in uncontrollable, mort de rire laughter on my part and an athsma attack—which is not smart to do around your slightly irritated Cameroonian neighbor is also holding a knife. The fact that she was adding an incredible amount of baking soda completely innocently—dumping a whole packet (2 TABLESPOONS) into each recipe of cake batter had me in convulsions.

I have now been kicked out of her house and she has conscripted my oven to finish baking her cakes because I am clearly not a kind or helpful friend/neighbor/child/sister.

Don't mess with a woman with a knife.