The Drunken Carrot Cake Incident

Ms. Johana doesn't compromise.

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This is how the subject of Ms. Johana’s carrot cake comes up:

We’re resting on the picnic bench after spending all morning putting the garden to bed for the season when a man walks into the garden. Ms. Johana has known him since birth and watched him as a young boy running wild when crack washed through East New York. Before he reaches us she tells me if it wasn’t for his mother he wouldn’t have pulled through and become the successful carpenter he is today.

The man has brought her a lunch of steak and fried plantains. When she opens the foil package, the scent of Caribbean flavors—garlic, ginger, allspice—drifts over us. Ms. Johana tastes a bit of meat and then a plantain slice.

“Thank you, thank you! This is so delicious,” she cries.

“Come on over to the church later,” he replies. “There’s going to be a huge spread cooked by a couple of Jamaican men, so you know it’s going to be delicious.”

“Just bring some around later,” she replies.

“You don’t have to come to the service.”

“Nah! Nah!! Nah!!!” she says, each one a little sharper than the last until the man finally gets her point and leaves.

“He knows I don’t go in for all that Seventh-Day stuff. I’ve told him again and again church and me have nothing to say to one another,” she says and begins to tell me the story about her carrot cake.

“A couple of years ago, he came around asking if I’d bake a cake for one of their suppers. I told him I’d be happy to bring my special carrot cake.”

The secret to her cake is rum-soaked raisins, and she happened to have had a year-old jar of them sitting in her closet. Ms. Johana truly respects other people’s beliefs and claims she didn’t know Seventh-Day Adventists don’t drink. But even if she did, nobody could expect her as a noted baker to not add well-soaked rum raisins into her famous carrot cake. Anyway, she points out to me, the rum evaporates in the cooking.

“I bake my cake and go down to the church, put my cake on the table, and a lady comes up and says, ‘Can I have a piece of your cake?’ I cut her a big slice and after she tastes it she leans over and says, ‘Oh, Ms. Johana, I never had a carrot cake so good like this one. What’s that wonderful flavor?’ I tell her that’s the rum raisins, and I’m telling you she about falls right over and says, ‘What am I going to tell my husband?!’ He must’ve been the minister or something, but I said to her, ‘Don’t tell him nothing.’ And oh, wouldn’t you know my cake was the first to go!”

P.S.: This is one in a series about Ms. Johana and her urban garden in East New York, Brooklyn. Get to her in the first post and her neighborhood.

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And don’t forget to come back on Saturday for Ms. Johana’s recipe!