I am trying to start a bakery out of my house, in Nicaragua. This is my kitchen.
On Monday, our friends ordered a cake for a dinner party at their restaurant on Tuesday. On Tuesday, the power went out. The fridge defrosted and 4 pounds of butter and my $10 bag of chocolate chips melted. On Wednesday, the fridge door wouldn’t close because I had forgotten to drain the water in the freezer from Tuesday’s defrost. On Thursday, I got tired of propping the fridge door closed with our dining room chair, so I attacked the freezer with an ice pick, making Sharon Stone proud. The ice was stubborn, yes, even in this unrelenting heat. Go figure. On Friday, I hooked the fridge door shut with a bungee cord and some muscle.
Our oven is a Mabe oven. Maybe it will work, Maybe it won’t.
Instead of a temperature gauge on the oven dial, it is marked with the numbers 1 thru 5. Even using an oven thermometer, I pretty much guess at the temperature. Today, 1.5 on the dial was 350 degrees. Yesterday, I cranked it to 4 and couldn’t get it above 200 degrees. Last week, I ran out of gas, both propane and my own.
Somehow, I still managed to deliver a pretty impressive triple layer chocolate cake to the restaurant at 5:30 on the dot.
They say that cooking is an art and baking is a science. Well, doing either in Nicaragua is a miracle – at lease in a Mabe kitchen.
An Expat Life in Nicaragua 
It is impressive!
And your adventures continue…
Should your power problem drain you again, here’s a link to some possible solutions. Or not.
http://www.birchhillhappenings.com/y2kbakin.htm
LOL! I can identify with that, too! We never did buy an horno in Nica because we weren’t sure that we were staying. So, we used an adobe oven. There is an art to cake baking in an adobe oven. I never did master it. But, you can be sure that when we move back to Ometepe, the first thing I’m buying is an horno. 🙂
The cake turned out great!!
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