Bake You Something?

Every leap of faith is a leap of growth, a leap of success and a leap of evolution. I’ve had an over-pouring passion for baking since birth, I can say. I admired the late auntie Anne, my mother’s sibling and a beautiful soul, whenever she would go baking. Auntie Anne would bake cakes, cookies and all confectioneries to be consumed at home, we would never buy any of it from the shops. Needless to say, there was nothing at the shop – any shop, that would beat the cakes auntie Anne would bake anyway. Nada! I’d stay so close to her and observe, and when I was thirteen, I’d bake my first cake. She’d be there to guide me through it of course. The natural tenderness in her way of handling human beings would provide a wonderful cushion for my errors throughout the coaching she’d give me, alongside the fact that we were, both, each other’s favorite people. Put auntie Anne in the same space as the passion that will be the death of me, connect the two and imagine my joy from the receiving end. It was crazy!

To finally be able to bake got me so excited that I would even sometimes bake when there was no need to – there would be cake already, enough cake. But I’d bake anyway, because I couldn’t help it. I’d picked auntie Anne’s whole recipe and run with it like it was my own. It made the best cakes, so why change it! I’d mastered that recipe and become too comfortable with it. So comfortable that I could use it with my eyes closed. Now, with my unstoppable desire to bake, there was too much cake around the house, we gave a lot of it out. Little did we know that we were creating so much demand from the giveaways that it provoked consideration to start selling. So, we sold.

Baking cakes for sale is a completely different ballgame from baking for home consumption, I didn’t know. Business came too early, it checked and disrupted my newborn zest to actually bake. I had to quickly learn to minimize errors if I was going to sell the cakes I baked. I had to become an overnight pro. Comfort was immediately thrown out the window and I had to learn a range of recipes to diversify and stay competitive, while keenly observing how the old players played the game, and learning. Diving in the deep met my strong survival instincts. So, I officially started the business you now know as OneRwak Cakes.

OneRwak Cakes was young, excited, trusting and ingenuous – totally oblivious to the bumps and roughness that would come along the course of entrepreneurship. I was young too, still pursuing my degree in electrical engineering at Makerere university, to become an engineer with UMEME six years later. I had to grow the business between school schedules and employment. The pressure was too much sometimes, I felt like giving it up and going back to just baking for free – the passion, where it all begun. It was more comfortable. But that thought often competed with the thought of using my passion to earn a living. Meaning; quitting everything and focusing fully on baking for survival. This would present the opportunity of doing what I love doing, dedicating ample time to it for improvement and earning money from it. “That’s how dreams are made after all, and I’m a dreamer”, I’d tell myself to keep the hope of it alive, only for the fear of failure to show up again. My mind would get exhausted from the debate, but not me.

The moment I felt like walking away from it all and embarking only on the salary that was always sure to come from the day job, was when I had to do my brother’s wedding cake. Being that the client was my very own brother this time, it felt like my own cake too. It was. So, I had to throw everything at it. It was to be the best cake I would ever have made, and it was indeed – a beautiful, floral tower of a cake. Ninety nine percent of my family members put in a good shift for me on this one, and we worked on it with our hearts and souls. The spirit was right, jokes and banter in the atmosphere, country music mixed with beautiful gospel in the background.. ey.. This was about everything, and not just the cake that was to be made. With the nature of vibration in making Eric’s cake, the only thing that was missing to make everything perfect was knowledge of technique, adequate enough, to hold that cake in place at his reception, and not crumble. I felt my soul leave my body when I came back from changing for the function after setting up the cake, and was told it had collapsed. I cursed my passion and the faith that was driving it. I was inconsolable.

What looks like failure is actually an invaluable opportunity to improve from the lessons it provides

I learned, from Eric’s cake, that for everything that happens to seem like bringing nothing but misgivings to your dream, you have the power to choose to look at it positively. What looks like failure is actually an invaluable opportunity to improve from the lessons it provides. But you gotta look at it that way first, for it to be that. If it hadn’t been my best cake to crumble on me, I probably would not have appreciated the errors I’d made in it well enough to be the baker that my clients say I am now. If I’d chosen the other way, from that moment, I would probably be merely a full-time engineer at UMEME, and doing just that. I’d have given up.

While the challenge to stick to my passion was provided by my brother’s wedding cake, the challenge to quit my job and devote everything to only baking was provided by the fear of uncertainty. “What’s going to happen to the bills if you struggle to equal the income that your salary has been generating?”, the devil would ask in a very loud voice, in my mind, that kept fading over time until it totally disappeared. I chose to believe and to commit to what I know and do best. And ever since then, it’s been an increasingly amazing journey of growth, success and evolution.

Yours,

Cynthia Ahurira

CEO – OneRwak Cakes