By John McCann

jmccann@heraldsun.com; 419-6601

DURHAM — Pat a cake, pat a cake, baker’s man,

Keijuane’s making cakes as fast as he can ...

“His cakes sell good. They come on Tuesday, and they’re gone on Tuesday,” Blue Coffee Café cashier Frances Brandon said. “There’s such a demand for them.”

Those would be Keijuane Hester’s cakes.

“I like the red-velvet [cake],” Brandon offered.

And there’s Hester’s German chocolate cake. And his Italian cream cake. The guy does a mean carrot cake, too.

Not that he grew up cooking.

“The only thing I cooked was cocaine,” Hester revealed.

That put him in prison for close to four years. But between those walls of confinement is where Hester learned how to mix stuff, stick it in an oven and pull out masterpieces. In fact, prison is where he got his recipe for carrot cake — from an inmate whose superior baking skills Hester insists can’t be touched.

“It’s not the tool of baking I want to be known by. I want to be known by the transformation that has took place in my life,” said Hester, who believes he wouldn’t be doing what he’s doing today if he hadn’t gotten locked up for selling drugs. “I’ve got this far by God. This is what my call was to do — to show that somebody who had a negative past could turn around and have a productive life and make an honest living.”

The business is called Favor Desserts. It’s a nod to God — God’s favor on Hester’s life, the baker said.

“I can honestly say that God has been faithful to me,” said Hester, 34.

Two years after graduating from Hillside High School, Hester in 1996 was caught on a drug charge that sent him away until 1999. He got out of prison and worked as a lab tech. There was restaurant work. And plumbing.

But Hester will tell you his hands were made for handling cakes. So with $30, a hand mixer, one regular oven and no pans, Hester started a baking business inside his townhouse. He’d sell cakes by the slice at barbershops and beauty salons.

“I started off small,” Hester said.

He’d sell a cake and then buy a pan, sell a cake, buy a pan, the baker said.

Now his cakes are in area restaurants like Blue Coffee Cafe and William’s Gourmet Kitchen. He bakes those bad boys in a big, beautiful home in southern Durham. There are three convection ovens these days. No more hand mixing, either.

“I sold a lot of drugs,” Hester recalled. “I’m not proud of that.

“All I did was switch hustles,” the baker said. “From crack man to cake man.”

Yet he’s not a fat man, because as inviting as those cakes are to the nostrils of others, Hester claims he’s immune to the aroma and thus not tempted to eat into his profit margin.

“I can’t smell it,” Hester said about the scents from his ovens.

And the recession — what recession?

“Folks still eating cakes, man,” Hester said.