Baking: Kenya Style

Many Kenyans do not have an oven but cook on kerosene stoves called “jiko”. This works just fine to cook many things but I assumed that baking would be pretty difficult. I was inspired last Friday night to try baking though when we were invited to dinner in the home of one of M’s colleagues, Francis and his wife, Atsubina. She managed to cook a cake on the jiko and it was pretty good. I would have used more sugar but most Kenyans don’t have a sweet tooth like I do. [to be fair, my sweet tooth is pretty legendary even in America]

We are going to have dinner at our pastor’s house tomorrow night so I decided to make toffee squares. This is a legendary recipe in M’s family that I made sure to learn immediately upon my return from my first visit. M’s entire family loves toffee squares and it’s a running family joke that his mom always makes them to carry to festive occasions thereby denying the family the chance to eat them. In fairness to her, the entire family consumes food with the speed of swarm of locusts, so I don’t blame her.

I have an advantage on Atsubina though because our flat does have an oven. It does have a hitch though: it only has two settings. One setting is “off” and the other is “on”. There is no temperature. Anyone with any [American] baking experience knows that baking requires exact cooking times and temps to achieve the desired result. Kenyan baking was a whole new experiment. The challenge was enhanced by the fact that we have no measuring cups and the recipe is in American measurements [1 cup, etc] and Kenyan ingredients are sold by the gram.

Check out this "cup" of brown sugar. It's as dark as coffee!


Nonetheless, M was game to help me figure out the measurements if it created a toffee square for him to enjoy in this hemisphere. Using what we had on hand [ yogurt containers, odd sized spoons, etc], we approximated measurements and used some old fashioned techniques. Below I am softening butter using an indirect heating method [that’s a nice way to say I nearly burned my hands off holding the pan that way].



We prepped the batter and slid the first batch in, setting our watches for the ~25 minutes of cooking time. Imagine our surprise when 7 minutes later, we smelled burning. So we’d functionally broiled it, awesome.

Max scrubs for surgery on the first batch. He excised the burnt parts and then promptly ate them. Apparently burned toffee squares are pretty tasty after a month of very little sugar!


There is only one rack so using a lower rack was not an option. Clearly we needed to do something to lower the temperature. What followed was a complex, very inexact task of turning the oven on and off to cook but not burn the toffee squares [it took about 35 minutes to complete the cooking of the second batch]. Luckily toffee squares have a very forgiving short-bread base so eventually we got a good approximation of cooking. Clearly though this oven is not going to work for a soufflé…

Here I am spreading the second batch:


The chocolate was melted, the nuts spread, we almost sweat to death [remember it’s 85 degrees in the kitchen and THEN we turned on the unvented oven], and the toffee squares were realized. Given the differences in flour, sugar, and nuts, they taste a little different but Kenyan toffee squares are pretty good! I’d invite M to say a few words about the experience but he’s busy smuggling toffee squares into his mouth, some things never change!