Bake Around the World: Write in the Kitchen: Albania, Shendetlie and Choosing New Endings

This year, I am endeavoring on a monthly challenge to bake around the world; write in the kitchen. The idea is inspired by Erin, my friend and author of This Footprint blog (IG @thisfootprint_blog) who participated in a cooking challenge for every country. Each month, I will randomly select a country and make a vegan version of a traditional dessert from that nation. And, each month, I will put intentional time into writing at least one non-Smile Project related piece. I look forward to expanding my confectionary acumen and baking around the world. And I look forward to sitting closer to home, writing for myself.

In the office, I am showing my colleagues photos of last month’s Nigerian puff puffs when they ask if I’ve selected May yet. I pull up the random country generator and my colleague presses the button: Albania. 

Albania—my first European nation—is on the western part of the Balkan peninsula and borders Montenegro, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Greece (as well as the Adriatic and Ionian Seas). My neighborhood has a strong Balkan population and up until their very recent closing, we had a specifically Albanian grocery store in short walking distance. Because of this, I felt most familiar with the cuisine—dessert and otherwise—compared to other randomly selected nations. 

Per Brittanica, “Much of Albania’s cuisine consists of meat and seafood. Among the most popular dishes are roasts, biftek (beef loin), qebaps (kabobs), and qoftë (meatballs).” So not much help for a vegan baker. I dove into other articles and one dish kept coming back to my mind and to the top of the lists—shendetlie.

Shendetlie is a popular Albanian dessert that is a cross between a shortbread biscuit and a cake. It’s basically a honey walnut cake that is soaked in syrup to soften the biscuit into a more cake-like consistency. 

Having locked in on this Albanian honey walnut cake, I knew my first step would be figuring out honey. Some vegans do eat honey but having never been a fan of it myself, it was easy enough to cut out entirely in my diet when I went vegan 6 years ago. I’m familiar with some bee-free vegan honeys that exist and also found a recipe to make my own but in truth, got too impatient and kind of made up my own “honey” substitute from agave, sugar, apple juice, and lemon juice.

I struggled to find a vegan Shendetlie recipe online but, My Albanian Food blog led me to a recipe that I figured I’d try my hand at adapting. I adapted and substituted so much, I truthfully had very low expectations for the end product. But when my friends and I bit into the warm, rich cake, every doubt was cast aside. It. was. delicious. It was the kind of delicious where suddenly I was kicking myself for not measuring or paying attention to all the swaps I was making to the original recipe. A lesson for another day. Because certainly a recipe I’ll be repeating.

Fast forward a couple weeks, the cake fully behind us and the end of the month creeping forward. A result of a week of work travel and a gnarly concussion keeping me from doing basically anything, I was feeling sad about my inability to get in a coffee shop writing session. 

Nevertheless, the idea was to bake around the world and write “in the kitchen.” So on a sleepy morning tucked under a couch blanket with my pajamas on and a bag of half-eaten unsalted pretzels on the table next to me, I curled up to write. 

I had written a letter of sorts earlier in the month—the kind of thing you throw together with no intention of sending and I wondered if I might expand on those early May paragraphs. Instead, I started writing a sort of plot summary. I introduced a few characters. Set the scene and foreshadowed where I saw each of them growing. It wasn’t built out. It wasn’t a complete character study. But I had an idea and was flowing with it until suddenly I wanted to ruin my character’s life. 

I abruptly broke the fourth wall and changed the piece into a sort of writer’s dilemma—the idea of creating a world just to watch it burn. The idea of writing through our own lived experiences as a fictional character, of watching them make the same mistakes we did, as if forcing ourselves empathy for a person we made up an hour ago would allow us to have some self compassion. But as I typed, on the precipice of disaster, I froze.

And for what? Would that get me any closer to the cause of my own pain? Would that bear me any relief to know how the story is going to end and to write it anyway? To write the warning signs. Would it even be possible to make a different ending? Would it have been possible to live one?

Perhaps we need not repeat our sins. Perhaps we need not linger in our sorrows. Perhaps, then, we can choose our own endings.

January: to beignets and book proposals (Gabon)

February: to spice cake and sunscreen (Grenada)

March: to rice pudding and Gregory (Colombia)

April: to puff puffs and how we relate (Nigeria)

May: to shendetlie and choosing new endings (Albania)

Nevertheless we write worlds and we create characters and we fall in love with them and we break their hearts. We don’t always let them learn from our mistakes. Sometimes, they make them twice as tragically. Even so, we tell stories. Despite this, we live.