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.