Cairo’s CanCake: The Baked Confection You Can Carry in Your Bag

Part of my ritualistic night-time overthinking routine, which has only aided in pumping hot air into my bloated and nearly bursting sense of “the end is nigh” existentialism, is creatively piecing together a strategic game plan for all possible doomsday scenarios (as one does at four in the morning, with an encroaching 7:01 AM alarm to be snoozed exactly nine minutes). And so recently, as I was mentally making a checklist of canned foods that could help sustain me in the event of a “damn, really should’ve recycled” apocalyptic event, I found myself shuddering at my options.

With a sweet tooth that can only be satisfied through the consumption of copious amounts of sweet creations, surviving on preserved mushrooms and pressed ‘meats’ sounded hellish (not as bad as the burning planet outside, of course, but BAD). I decided to put my social media sleuthing skills to the test and, lo and behold, I stumbled upon ‘CanCake,’ the canned cake that can cure my culinary craving (bet you can’t say that ten times).

For real though, this cake, which you can store in your freezer for three months, comes in a one-slice portion container with an airtight seal. The idea is, when your cake-affliction is especially acting up, you don’t impulsively purchase a whole cake (most of which you’ll end up either shamefully wolfing down or, even more shamefully, throwing out) but can get one portable portion instead.

“I wanted something that was convenient for everyone and to limit food waste,” Mai El Raffie, founder of CanCake tells SceneEats.“You can even put it in your bag; nothing will spill.”

Following a decade spent in the cake-corner of the gastronomy world and with a culinary degree from Le Cordon Bleu London in hand, El Raffie broke out into the local market with Amaretti, her first commercial dessert venture. Her second culinary child, CanCake, is more of an everyday product, centred around offering cake-lovers a “cheap and convenient canned cake”.

As El Raffie explains to SceneEats, by offering a six-pack of diverse flavoured CanCakes, including salty caramel fudge and strawberry vanilla crumble, guests at gatherings won’t have to settle for one flavour that might not appeal to all (I’m looking at you, eftekasat-Ramadan-cake buyers), thus leading to wasted treats.

Currently co-branded with Cult and Brown Nose, as well as conveniently available on Cairo’s hottest e-commerce platform Botit (shameless plug), CanCake has “a lot of new collaborations coming up,” El Raffie teases yours truly, “and some exciting new flavours, too.”

I don’t know about you, but a choco fudge cake I can just pull out during particularly long meetings that could’ve been a twitter thread (or, the likelier scenario: during a face-off with a reptilian alien invader) already sounds great, not sure what other flavour could get me as excited. Almond mocha? Cherry cheesecake? Or, considering the upcoming holy season, basbousa perhaps?