Ten-year-old Benedict is feeling happy. His family's new home in Swaziland has the most beautiful garden in the whole entire world, teeming with insects, frogs and his favourite cinnamon-coloured birds. Here, crouched in the cool shade of the lucky-bean tree, it's easy to forget the loneliness that comes from his siblings playing without him, easy to stop himself fretting about how to fix his Mama's failing cake-baking business. Not that Benedict generally allows sad or uncomfortable things to cloud his day. Usually, he simply finds a way to put things right. Like trying to learn the language of his strange new country, to make himself feel less of an outsider. Like persuading the people at Ubuntu Funerals to provide a decent burial for the beautiful hoopoe killed by their van. Or like being a friend to Nomsa, a girl brave enough to pick up a spider but too afraid to tell anyone why her teacher is making her stay late after school. Of course, there are many things in Africa...

Meet Angel Tungaraza - Kigali's very favourite cake baker. Angel bakes cakes for every occasion, giving comfort and good advice to her friends and neighbours; but she also hides a painful secret. Can she finally admit the truth about her children?Angel Tungaraza is a very special somebody, a business-woman, mother and grandmother, known throughout Kigali for her mouth-watering celebration cakes. Over hot sweet tea and plates of fondant morsels, Angel takes down her customers' orders, listens to their stories - for she is cake maker, confidante and councel - and busies herself around the details of their lives. But Angel hides her own secrets - a darkness clouds her eyes when she thinks about the deaths of her two children, Joseph and Vinas."Baking Cakes in Kigali" is a charming and soulful story of a country in recovery, where heartbreak lives alongside hope for the future.