Bake Around the World: Write in the Kitchen: Nigeria, Puff Puffs and How We Relate

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.

I’m standing on the subway platform with a colleague when she asks if I’ve picked my April country yet. I haven’t and next thing I know we’re pulling up a random country generator and she’s pressing the button: Nigeria. There is a Nigerian fast casual restaurant near our office that we both frequent but that’s lunch. The dessert options of the country I’m not as familiar with.

Nigeria, located on the west coast of Africa, is the most populous nation on the continent. Having long prided myself on being good with maps, I could have told you that Nigeria is bordered by Benin, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger (and of course, the Atlantic Ocean). What I couldn’t have told you is that Nigeria is bigger than the state of Texas (356,669 square miles to Texas’s 268,597). 

Per Brittanica, “Food is an important part of Nigerian life. Seafood, beef, poultry, and goat are the primary sources of protein. With so many different cultures and regions, food can vary greatly. In the southern areas a variety of soups containing a base of tomatoes, onions, red pepper, and palm oil are prepared with vegetables such as okra and meat or fish. Soups can be thickened by adding ground egusi (melon) seeds. Gari (ground cassava), iyan (yam paste), or plantains accompany the soup. Rice is eaten throughout the country, and in the north grains such as millet and wheat are a large part of the diet. Beans and root vegetables are ubiquitous. Many dishes are flavoured with onions, palm oil, and chilies.”

Something I really am enjoying about randomly selecting countries and deep diving into their history and specifically their food traditions is that up until a week or so ago, I’d never even heard of gari (the ground cassava product). It’s really opened my eyes up to seeking out new-to-me foods and exploring beyond just the baking recipe I choose each month. In fact, the blogger I would use for this month’s challenge has three different gari cookie recipes (standard; double chocolate chip; and date). I’m looking forward to trying those another time.

So about this baker. Once my country is selected, I begin by searching “[country] traditional desserts.” Then, once I’ve selected a dessert, I look for a recipe and see how I might adopt it to my vegan lifestyle. This time, though, someone had done the work for me. Meet Tomi Makanjuola, the Vegan Nigerian. Per her website, The Vegan Nigerian is “a platform dedicated to making Nigerian cuisine and the vegan lifestyle accessible to the mainstream through online resources, workshops, and bespoke events.” I highly recommend giving Tomi a follow on Instagram (@vegannigerian) and spending some time on her very well-organized website.

By the time I landed on her page, I knew I wanted to make puff puffs (though her website made me want to make about 1000 other things as well)! Puff puffs are a deep fried Nigerian snack—crunchy on the outside, pillow soft on the inside, according to Tomi. At first I wasn’t sure if the puff puffs were going to feel too similar to the Gabonese beignets I’d made in January, but the more I dove into Nigeria food culture, the more it seemed like the most urgent choice—puff puffs came up first on almost every list. 

Like the beignets, I imagined these treats were best consumed fresh which is why—a night before I was going to leave town for a few days for a solo trip where I wouldn’t want to bake an ideally shareable treat—I opened Tomi’s puff puff recipe and began. The dough has to rise for an hour, which gave me time to go for an evening run and time to totally commit to it, even though I hadn’t started packing. It only took a few minutes to get my dough together and even frying the dough later—which is typically not my favorite kitchen task—was manageable. Before long, my partner and I were sitting on the sofa and floor of our apartment (I can’t get myself to sit on the sofa while I’m all post-run sweaty), snacking on puff puffs and watching Jeopardy! 

For a fairly short ingredient list, they tasted both simple and complex at the same time. They aren’t terribly sweet and the soft pillow-y inside is true to form. My puff puffs turned out more like pancake-shaped treats but I wasn’t going for any presentation medals on my first go. Overall, we loved them and ate them all that night.

Unlike previous months, I actually wrote before I baked this month. About a week prior, I’d gone to a coffee shop and sat down to write about female friendships. At first, I tried to approach it as an essay. Then fiction. None of it was clicking even remotely. Finally, I gave up, took a sip of my tea, and started a new page: “Sometimes you hate a paragraph so much, no amount of re-reading or editing can save it.” 

I proceeded to sit there and write a fiction piece about human relationships—about two runners who meet at a bar and their connection to family, career, and each other. It flowed effortlessly as I developed my characters and when I had to break their hearts towards the end, I could feel my own chest tightening up. 

When I got home that afternoon, I remember telling my partner about how funny it is to be in control of the narrative but to know that sometimes the best thing to do is the hard thing. To know that the story gets better when you acknowledge that which is difficult. 

It’s my favorite thing I’ve written this year.

January: to beignets and book proposals 

February: to spice cake and sunscreen.

March: to rice pudding and Gregory.

April: to puff puffs and how we relate.

“Never trust the first mile” is conventional distance running wisdom. And, depending how much you run, sometimes the advice is to never trust the first three.

The opening miles are for working out the kinks. They’re for catching your breath and settling into your pace. They’re for the gentle stretch of muscles. The expanding of lungs.