I don't know if you have ever had a mad-craving for chocolate cake with no oven to cook it in. How are you going to survive? How are you going to have your cake and eat it too? These were questions I was facing the day my oven broke.
Thankfully, I am just about the most willful woman that I have ever met. Ingenuity should be my middle name.
I built an edible garden. This is just my front lawn. I did it with a shovel, rake, hoe, pea gravel, riverbed/farmland rocks (we call them Love Rocks because my husband would bring a few to me when he came home from the fields or an adventure), mulch, wood, and a wheel barrow (and when the wheel barrow broke I used buckets and my sons' Radio Flyer wagon). That's it. I'm 32 and 5' 2". Mother of three boys ages 7, 5 and 7-weeks. I am woman, hear me roar and what-not. I Will Survive like the great Gloria Gaynor.
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| the front gardens with my campfire ring of rocks in the center |
I have never taken a cooking or gardening class. I was a personal trainer and aerobics instructor before I broke ground. Being vegan, I eat mainly fruits, vegetables and I flavor nearly everything with fresh herbs. Personal training tanked. I had to garden or do without. I chose to garden.
Fast-forward three years and I have another son, a ginormous garden, no microwave and a broken oven.
Oh, and a craving.
I grabbed my husband's Dutch-oven, built a fire in my homemade pit and went to it. And you know what...it worked. I had chocolate cake for dinner. Then grilled some corn. Then made a lentil stew befit for royalty. It was at that moment that I knew I may never cook a meal in-doors again. I was having too much fun playing with fire, cooking and surviving (enjoying) my quasi-crisis.
In order to bake a cake I needed to do the following:
Build a fire. Wait till I had a lot of coals when the wood burned down.
Prepare the Dutch-oven. Lawd knows what my husband, Ernest Hemingway incarnate, cooked in it last. Wiped it out thoroughly and oiled it with coconut oil.
Fished out his High-Heat gloves.
Located a hand-brush to wipe off the ash and coals at the end of the process.
Threw together the ingredients to my favorite vegan chocolate cake in a 9-inch cake pan.
Chocolate Cake:
1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup Hershey's Cocoa Powder
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1 cup warm water
1/3 cup coconut oil
1 tsp. vinegar
Grab your 9-inch cake pan and mix the dry ingredients together in the pan.
Grab a liquid measuring or Mason jar and stir together the wet ingredients. Pour the wet into the dry and mix up.
Place the pan in your Dutch-oven (DO). Pop the lid on.
Place oven in a bed of coals.
There are a few cardinal rules, as the idiom goes, for DO cooking/baking. Figure out the diameter of the oven. Most actually have it stamped on the top. You need 2 big coals for every inch of the diameter of your DO to bring it to 300 degrees. So my husband, Chris, has a 10-inch DO. I need 20 coals to make my DO 300 degrees. 8 underneath. 12 on top.
For every additional 25 degrees add another coal at the bottom and the top. I want a 350 degree oven to bake my cake so I need to add 2 coals underneath the DO and 2 more on top. Simple-enough.
I ended up with about 10 big coals underneath and 14 coals on top of the lid to bring the heat up to 350 for my chocolate cake to bake.
This is the fun part. In order to see if you have a good source of heat, hold your hand about a foot over the coals and see if it is hot. If you think it's not hot enough, toss on a few more red hot coals with a shovel. When you smell your chocolate cake at about 35-40 minutes into the bake time it may be done. Use your hand broom and sweep all of the coals and ash back into the fire. Using gloves, carefully remove the lid a little to let off steam. Check the cake for doneness. I see if it springs back with a touch of a finger on the middle. If it is goey, it needs more baking time. So lid, toss some hot coals on top and give it tenish minutes until it smells delish.
Give it the brush-a-roo. Carefully remove the lid and remove from the DO from the coal bed. Carefully remove the cake pan and let cool. Slice and serve.
I was so gratified by the turn-out of the chocolate cake that I ran around the house and grabbed Chris' grill top from his homemade stone-grill thingy where he does all of his out-door cooking. Ran the grill-top up the slope and tossed it over my coals, shucked some corn, slathered on Earth Balance Butter, pulled some thyme, rosemary, parsley and other herbs from the garden and sprinkled them on buttered corn and slapped those corn-puppies on the grill-top and rotated them till they were nice and sizzly. Then, I sliced up some of green-tomatoes and popped them on the grill and cooked them until they were pea-green and soft. Tossed a piece of grilled corn, the grilled green-tomatoes with fresh torn basil, and wedge of chocolate cake onto a plate and served it to all of our family with teeth. We all have a lovely set of teeth except my little lambkin, baby boy.
And Dinner was served. I survived Day 1 without an oven and I added a new cooking skill to my repertoire. I will never be the same again.
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