03-06-2025
Baking in a prison, and a recipe for Tres Leches cake
Tres leches ('three milks') cake for Mahin Boland Karami
Mahin Boland Karami works full-time in prison. The mop is broken and she has to spend hours bent double cleaning the toilets, the corridors, and everywhere else with a broken implement. When the working day is done, she twists her hips and shows off her Kurdish dancing. No wonder her blood sugar levels have dropped.
'I want a very, very sweet cake. I don't have enough money for a cream puff. Give me something else this time.'
'OK. It'll be ready in about two hours.'
This was probably the last conversation Mahin and another prisoner had about pastries. Not long afterwards, the kitchen was shut down, and Mahin froze to death.
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This is a treat of Spanish origin, and easy to prepare.* If you invite someone to enjoy it with you, don't forget to tell them that, at the first hearing of her trial, Mahin defended herself in Kurdish. Then emphasise that she was a real 'Leyla Zana' – a Kurdish member of the Turkish parliament who was jailed for fifteen years for doing the same thing. And don't forget to follow this up with this poem by the Iraqi-Kurdish poet Sherko Bekas:
In the land of the gallows and ashes and spoilsyou are the sister of the motherland's evergreens,and when you were being devoured by the whales and monsters,from the sun of today's women,from the infernal orators of today,there were none who had not tied their tongues out of fear,there were none who had not hidden their voices under the pillowand their courage in the is the shining day of your glowing is the eighth of year on this day,that beautiful dove from Kirkuktakes to the skyand lands on the windowsill of Leyla Zana's prison.
This cake is indeed very sweet. But don't let that worry you; it is delicious. Arabs are probably responsible for the high sugar content of Spanish cakes.
Cake ingredients
190g flour
1 tsp baking powder
115g butter
190g sugar
5 eggs
1⁄2 tsp vanilla essence
Milk mixture ingredients
200ml milk
200ml condensed milk
200ml clotted cream
Directions
Mix the butter and sugar until light and creamy. Add the eggs one by one, followed by the vanilla essence, flour and baking powder. Pour the mixture into greased tins. Place in a preheated oven for 30–40 minutes at 180°C. When completely cool, use a toothpick to poke little holes all over the top of the cake. Whip the double cream and mix thoroughly with the milk and condensed milk. Pour the whole lot over the top of the cake. Leave in the refrigerator for a day or so for the milk mixture to penetrate. Decorate your cake with whipped cream, fruit, or cinnamon.
* The origins of tres leches cake lie in Latin America, although there is debate about whether its genesis was in Mexico, where soaked desserts were popular in the mid-nineteenth century, or Nicaragua. When Nestlé opened up factories in Mexico in the 1930s, it printed a recipe for tres leches on the back of its cans of condensed and evaporated milk.
Excerpted with permission from The Evin Prison Bakers' Club by Sepideh Gholian, published by Oneworld Publications.
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