In which I celebrate a month at post by making a chocolate cake with chocolate icing

For as long as I have been able to remember his birthdays, my dad has eaten my mom’s chocolate cake with chocolate icing for his birthday cake. There may been a few years where there was a blackberry pie thrown in, but really, he’s always been about the chocolate cake with chocolate icing. It’s safe to say that I’ve eaten this chocolate cake with chocolate icing at least once a year for the past 22 years.

At the beginning of August, my mom sent me an email. In it she talked about my dad’s recent birthday, and thus, she talked about cake she made him for his birthday, chocolate with chocolate icing.

Since then I hadn’t been able to get it out of my head.

After I received that email, I checked the recipe I had on my computer. I had seen all the ingredients for the cake and icing since I had moved to Benin, minus powdered sugar and cocoa powder, but I had heard whisperings these things were available in Cotonou.

The day of our swear-in ceremony in Cotonou, we had 4 hours afterward to shop in the supermarkets in the city. Other volunteers set out into the city with dreams of Snickers bars and Parmesan cheese. I had my heart set on cocoa powder and powdered sugar.

My mission was accomplished 3000 CFA (about two days pay at the time) later.

Since then I have guarded the ingredients for the chocolate cake with chocolate icing, until today, my one-month anniversary of being at post, the date which I told myself would be an appropriate date to make the chocolate cake with chocolate icing.

I started out the day not so hot. Two minutes before my first class started, I realized I had left my chalk at home. My first class was the class in which I had given them a pop quiz the previous class period because they wouldn’t stop talking.

But nothing could stop me this morning. For today was the day I was going to eat chocolate cake with chocolate icing.

I started making the cake after lunch. Four hours later, I had one cooked layer, one burned layer and a small bowl of the chocolate icing.

After icing the unburnt layer, I sat down to eat my chocolate cake with chocolate icing.

After the third bite, I realized it would take me days to eat it all myself.

It didn’t quite taste the same as when my mom made it. Could have been that it wasn’t cool. Could have been that I only had margarine and not butter. It tasted like a chocolate with chocolate icing, but not the chocolate cake with chocolate icing.

It also could have been that it wasn’t so much the cake all those times I had eaten it before, but that it the first time I was eating the cake not with my family. It could have been that sometimes, it’s not so much the cake that makes the different, but who you’re eating it with.

I put my fork down and covered the cake with another plate. I walked outside carrying the cake and knocked on my neighbor’s door.

“I just made this American cake, and it’s too much for me,” I said. “Do you want to taste it?”