More than a meal, more than fuel and so much more than the sum of its calories, cake is pure pleasure. Renowned baker Nadine Ingram describes her romance with cake-making.
MY love affair with baking is an expression of my intentions for the people I’m baking for. Of devotion, celebration and acceptance. This belonging to one another has been baked into the layers of my cakes, as a way of connecting to you through my heart.
My purpose to bake the sweetness into people’s lives began with scones and swapping recipes in every country dance hall from Putty to McCullys Gap, in the New South Wales Hunter Valley. Somewhere in between the Gypsy Tap and the Veleta Waltz we would break for tea to give all the women a chance to critique one another’s baking.
This was the perfect apprenticeship for my induction into Michelin-star kitchens, where the chefs were kinder than some of the stoic farmers’ wives. Those years of building a career, the learning of a craft and striving to be “good at something” were all-consuming. I found the repetitive nature of baking combined with the harsh discipline of everything needing to be perfect prevented a synergy between my mind, body and heart.
I feel it wasn’t until I started to get to know myself a bit better that I began to appreciate the beauty of what I was doing. Intuitively and lovingly, I got to know the personalities of each cake by learning how to build a relationship with them. In the same way friends bring out the best in one another, by listening with tenderness, I fold softly whipped meringue through sponge, and listen for the cake to whisper that it’s ready to come out of the oven.
Naturally, my romance with cake found its way into the crumbs. It’s layered into croissant dough. It appears as kaleidoscopes of light reflected from a bowl of butter and sugar as they wrapped themselves around the beater and bounce across the room.
The intense pleasure of cake has become the liminal state between the making and my connection to you. There’s the promise of euphoria that we’re both drawn to, the anticipation of joy, of healing or simply escape. And then there’s the celebration, and the sharing. The giving and the gift.
Cake is pure pleasure. It’s been a blessing for me to have spent a life flourishing among the love crumbs of this romance.
