Jenneh Kaikai, the owner of Pelah Kitchen, an in-home, micro-bakery in Bedford-Stuyvesant, fell in love with baking growing up amongst her West African family.
Her earliest memories of baking began with watching her Sierra-Leonean mother make a signature pound cake — mixing each ingredient by hand and even breaking the bowl to make sure the texture was correct.
Following in her mother’s footsteps, Kaikai quickly discovered her love for baking and was deemed the designated baker for every holiday, celebration and even on random afternoons.
Baking was just a creative outlet for Kaikai until the pandemic, but her passion grew to the point it couldn't be contained. In 2020, she traded in her job at City Hall as a policy advisor to become a vendor at Building Black Bed Stuy’s marketplace selling baked goods and eventually cakes.
Now, her love for baking has transformed into a full-time, in-home bakery and decorating classes for her community.
“I think baking offered this like [a] deviation from that, like that rigorous idea of what I would need to do to be successful, you know, um, or just it just offered the space to play and be creative,” she said.
Named after the Mende word home, Pelah Kitchen, which specializes in botanical cake artistry, is an ode to culture. Kaikai takes pleasure in making her classes more than simply about decorating a cake, but about creating a community like how she began with her family.
Classes are beginner-friendly and teach participants how to create Pelah Kitchen’s signature floral designs.
Kaikai said her signature floral cake designs were instinctual, as it began when her old roommate would bring back flowers from her job at Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm.
She would play around with different colors, adding them to her cakes completely unaware of the possibilities. As her love for floral arrangements grew, she realized it was a way to express creativity on a piece of delicious cake.
“The flowers really I think just add to the aesthetics of the cake…” explained Kaikai.
“I say often that you know Pelah cakes taste as good as they look," she said. "I really put a lot of pride in the quality of the ingredients I'm using, and also just like really serving you like a really delicious piece of cake because that's what it's about.”
The micro-bakery is known for its careful use of sourced ingredients and spices from other small businesses and farmer's markets in Brooklyn all the way to Ghana.
There’s a story behind every element of Pelah’s cakes, according to Kaikai. Her love for personalization and attention to detail is what she believes truly sets her apart from other commercial bakers.
As her business continues to take off, Kaikai hopes to continue to foster relationships in her community through her classes and baking services. In the future, she hopes Pelah’s Kitchen finds its forever home and becomes a one-stop-shop for all things baked goods, coffee and love.
Pelah Kitchen is hosting its next cake decorating classes on March 14 and March 28.
