Mohammed Awadallah Builds a Cake Empire Without Knowing How to Bake

In the annals of modern entrepreneurship, we are accustomed to certain origin stories. The tech whizz in a garage. The chef perfecting a family recipe. Then there is the story of Mohammad Awadallah, a Jordanian marketing maven whose path to creating the nation’s premier chocolate cake shop began with a crucial, almost whimsical, deficit—he didn’t know how to bake.

“I’m a mess in the kitchen,” he confesses with a cheerful lack of ceremony. “Whenever I come to experiment, the cooks just get super angry because I'm all over the place.” This is not false modesty. When he launched his brand, Mekasa, from his home in 2019, he was, by his own admission, a man who loved cake but was “not a good cook or anything.”

His journey started with a silver screen fantasy. “In 2011, I watched a movie called 'Chocolat',” he recalls. The image of the whimsical chocolate shop lodged in his mind, a dream that persisted through a successful corporate career in marketing. Yet the dream had what he calls a “huge hiccup.” How do you build a cake shop when the core product is a mystery to you?

So, he did what any savvy marketer would do: he started with the branding. “I started this thing backwards,” he says, the amusement clear in his voice. “I did the logo, I did the branding, I did the marketing, I did the packaging… everything in the back end. I still don't know how to make cakes.” For years, he sketched and planned, a general designing a battle for which he had no soldiers.

The turning point was a maternal recipe and a leap of faith. He went to his mother, secured her chocolate cake recipe, and began selling from home. The marketer in him thrived, but the businessman had a steep learning curve ahead. In 2021, he took a loan and opened a physical shop. “It flopped,” he says. He returned to his marketing job, but this time, the dream was fortified with gritty research. He became a student of food costing, inventory, and, crucially, chocolate itself.

Armed with this new knowledge, he adopted the role of conductor. He hired a chef and became the visionary. His mandate was uncompromising quality: the finest Belgian Callebaut chocolate, the best brown sugar, the best flour. “I just know that for a fact,” he says of his early, unshakeable conviction. “I'm gonna be number one in Jordan. I don't know why, I don't know how, I don't know anything, but I just know that for a fact.”

Then came the break that feels almost like a fairy tale. A member of Jordan’s royal family ordered a cake, loved it, and posted about it on Instagram. “That this is the best chocolate cake that she ever had,” Awadallah recounts. Overnight, his customer base shifted to the “highest end of Jordan.” He leaned in, refining his slogan to a confident, almost cheeky assertion.

But it was his own personal story, shared on his growing social media profile, that truly forged the connection. “I shared my story— that I am clueless in the kitchen, and cannot bake and yet I opened a cake shop." People, he found, became attached to the story. They were drawn to the romance of a dream pursued backwards, the audacity of a man whose primary skill was not baking, but believing.

His approach to innovation is similarly singular. He describes his management style as “dictator,” though the term is softened by his genial tone. “No one knows what's inside my head,” he explains, justifying his unwavering vision. He avoids trends, instead spending his nights in deep research, visualising new creations which he then describes to his chefs in precise, sensory detail. “I just do cakes with dark chocolate,” he says, his loyalty to the bean absolute. He is the conceptual cake maker; they are the artisans who bring his visions to life.

From a home kitchen and a failed first attempt, Mekasa now employs 14 people and is, by credible accounts, the top chocolate cake shop in Jordan. The dream has expanded—a new brand, ‘Perfect Cake for Two’, for couples celebrating “date nights [or] breakups,” and plans for flagship branches in Saudi and Dubai and international franchises.

So, what is the engine for such an unorthodox success? He offers a final, poignant thought in Arabic: “دعوات امي” — the drive of an ambitious spirit. It’s a phrase that needs no translation, a quality that needs no recipe. For Mohammad Awadallah, the secret ingredient was never in the pantry; it was, and remains, entirely in the heart.