When I’m out on longer tours, the food can become rather one-sided. I often prepare the food on some sort of kitchen with burners, pots and frying pans. This is the equipment the cooking is limited to. Sometimes during the trip, it is still fun to spice up the ordinary and make the food more luxurious. Nothing for example beats a fresh baked chocolate cake far away from civilization! The problem is that you don’t usually carry an oven with you, but fortunately there are several tricks to that. I tested one of these tricks, and for that you need the following:

• Trangia, pots and frying pan (lid). I recommend a Trangia with a gas burner.
• Disposable aluminium foil pan
• Chocolate cake dough

Say that you would like to bake a chocolate cake in the wild. Well, good news for you then! Grocery stores sells “ready to bake” flour mixtures of different sugar cakes. The only thing you need to add is oil and water. Then you just have to follow the instructions below:

1. Mix the dough for example in a plastic bag and pour the dough in the aluminum foil pan. I used a half bag (ca. 150 g) of the flour mixtures to get the aluminium foil pan half filled.
2. Place the foil pan in the Trangia pot. Put a few coins, rocks or nuts in the bottom of the pot so that there becomes a gap between the foil pan and the Trangia pot.
3. Put the lid on the pot.
4. Adjust the burner to the minimal and bake the cake for about 25 minutes.
5. Voilà! Enjoy your fresh baked chocolate cake.

The equipment you need.

Nuts in the bottom of the pot.

Aluminium foil pan placed into the Trangia pot.

Baking in full process.

The chocolate cake is ready!

Bon Appétit!

I have also found other instructions saying that you should have the cake on the frying pan and a pot upside down on top of the cake, but because I have a non-stick Teflon pan, I don’t want it against the flame directly, and there are also theories that the Teflon surface would emit harmful gases that would end up in the cake.

P.S. The Trangia is not made for these purposes, so if you are going to try this out, it is done entirely on your own risk. During my bakings and experiments the Trangia has still not received any defects, and the pot and the pan looks yet really normal.