‘In the beginning there was cake’ was first published on bee-bakes.com, September 1, 2014
I love baking: it’s in my blood, it’s part of my family. I don’t mean that my father is a Michelin star chef or my mother writes culinary books—though she probably could—I mean that baking forms part of our history.
I grew up in my mother’s kitchen, in Australia, watching her make recipes from a long line of bakers: ginger biscuits from Great Aunt Emma, Gran’s honey rolls, five types of Australian ‘sponge cakes’. Mum baked from home, creating treats using many of those recipes and it’s this experience that gave me a love of baking. I measured ingredients, prepared tins, packed biscuits into bags and watched the smiles on the people’s faces as they took goodies, sometimes a dozen cakes at a time!
Tales of baking and food abound and weave themselves into our family folklore. It only just clicked that I’m a fifth generation baker! Turns out my Great-Great-Grandfather was actually a town baker sometime back in the 1800s. His son then went on to make the bread and cakes for the family and so it was passed down. Many of our tastiest recipes come from my Great Aunt Emma—legend has it that when she passed away aged 99 she still sported a sizeable muscle in her arm from years of hand beating cakes. I can’t even imagine whipping cream by hand as my Gran did in the early days of her marriage in 1930s Australia, or how she churned out hand beaten sponges for local charity events. She stored milk and butter in a refrigerator my Grandfather made for them (the engine was outside the house so it wasn’t too noisy inside).
And then there was me.
So along comes me on the verge of a career in French pâtisserie in France. How did I get to this point? Well, here’s the short version: as the ‘baby of the family’ with two sweet-toothed parents, I grew up on a farm in Victoria surrounded by fresh produce and good ol’ fashioned country cooking. But I wanted to get out and see the world, so I left at 18 and went to uni, moved to the big smoke and tried to forge a career in online editing. Then in the mid-2000s, like all good Aussies, I traded it all in for the even bigger smoke of London, where I ended up living for seven years. Somewhere along the way I met and married Nick the Greek from the Peloponnese, Greece. I backpacked around Europe for a few months on my own and then travelled with Nick or with friends, taking note of local dishes, pilfering recipe ideas where I could and savouring local foods.
Meanwhile, to fund all this travel I sat at a computer working as a web editor, a copy writer and sometimes what felt like a data entry assistant. I daydreamed of having my own business one day, of being creative with food instead of websites. I always went back to cake though: I organised bake sales for fund-raising events, made birthday cakes and arranged afternoon tea at my house for friends, allowing me to try new and old recipes. After seven years tied to a desk in fast paced London, I began thinking of going part-time and starting my own business—I looked into renting kitchens and at market stalls in North London where we lived.
Then it happened: France.
When I was an Arts student I wrote a ‘bucket list’ of things I wanted to do in my life and on that list was: move to France and paint. Though I don’t paint as much as I used to, when my husband, who is a scientist, was offered a job in France, was I going to say no? Mon Dieu, NON! So we moved to Lyon: food capital of France, some say Europe, with around 1500 restaurants, pâtisseries on every corner, Michelin stars bouncing off gloriously coloured buildings, multiple markets every day of the week…oh my, the markets…
So, here we are in Lyon, 2014, and I’m about to start training to become a French pâtissière (pastry chef). I wouldn’t say it’s been an easy road to get to this point, nor is the path ahead looking that smooth but it’ll be an adventure!
