Tara: A Baker's Adventure

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IF I WERE TO HAVE listed my top ten dream jobs while still studying at the university, baking would never have made the list. There seemed to be something boring about it. Sifting, creaming, and whipping were repetitive; plus, I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. I loved structure and a routine I didn't have to create and follow for myself. A company, I thought, was where I belonged. Graduating from the university with a second class upper in Mass Communication, I was ready to submit my CV to EbonyLife TV, and was even more ready to call that uncle of mine who had promised me a job right after graduating from the university until my mother informed me that he had relocated to some other country. Germany, to be precise.

At first, I was upset, until it turned into anger. What was it with relatives promising heaven and earth and then being nowhere to be found what it was time to come through? There was something about people breaking promises they had made unprovoked that annoyed me. I harboured this resentment against him until I reached the final stage of grief: acceptance. Besides, growing up a little made me realize that one of the constant things in life was change. Life happens, and the man just felt like there was so much he could do. Things he could achieve better in a foreign environment.

In order to avoid staying home and doing nothing as an unemployed graduate, I decided to go into baking while I searched for a job. I didn't necessarily enjoy or love to eat cakes, but it seemed like the next best thing. The very first time I tried a hand at baking, however, was a disaster. The turnout was a sunk-in-the-centre, hard-rock cake that left me feeling like I couldn't do something so simple. But that was it. Baking wasn't so simple. Something so simple couldn't teach me patience and the need to pay attention to details, and I'd grown to love it. I'd grown to love the process, developing intuition of what might probably work, knowing what exactly goes into a recipe, and most of all, I loved seeing the works of my own hands.

Three years into my journey as a baker, I had a cute bakery somewhere on Adeola Odeku Street. It was the perfect location— not so far from home, always buzzing with activities from the shopping stores, offices, market stalls, and fruit sellers. On more than three occasions, its flexibility had led people to stroll casually into the bakery to check out my products. I had quite a long list of customers, and two of them had come into the bakery that way.

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My stomach churned in hunger the moment Uche sat on the high stool opposite me, unwrapping the newspaper that contained one of the few things I could hardly say no to. Mummy Dera's akara had to be the best thing about the bakery's location. Discovering its existence was like discovering gold and it soon became our treasure.

The moment I caught sight of steam from the brown balls made from grounded, deep-fried bean powder, my mouth watered. "Uche, please don't finish that thing without me."

"I was waiting for you to say it. You're always hungry," he chuckled. "How far? How you dey?"

Uche was my delivery guy and my best friend in the world, and when I mentioned that change was only one of the constant things in life, it was because I know that Uche was another constant. And it was days like this when he walked into the bakery with the aroma of akara following after him, that I was extra grateful for him.

"I had to leave that house fast today. My mother wanted to kill me with marriage talk." 

It was starting to feel like my mother just wanted me out of her house with her overbearing attitude. Her speaking about marriage everyday wasn't doing what she was hoping for it to do, because at the end of the day, I wasn't very much bothered. I couldn't, for the life of me, explain why she seemed so obsessed with marriage. Maybe she was eagerly waiting for grandkids. Maybe it was the thrill of a wedding she was looking forward to. The thrill of her daughter's wedding which would end up being her wedding, anyway. She was looking forward to inviting all her different community of friends and asking them to come with their own relatives. She couldn't wait to insist on having ridiculous names of colours like onion purple, custard yellow, ata rodo red as the dress colour code. Or maybe she just wasn't comfortable with the idea that I was twenty six years old and without a boyfriend.