Baking and me

It all began before I was tall enough to even see over the kitchen table top and had to stand on a chair to reach the mixing bowl. My mother was a firm believer in letting us try things ourselves and (thankfully) didn't mind the mess we made in the process (she was also a firm believer in making us tidy up after ourselves - clever woman!). I watched Mam baking cakes and tarts and making desserts, worked my apprenticeship as her Little Helper (official title), before progressing on to Little Baker.

One of the first things I mastered was the versatile fairy cake (or 'bun' as it was known in our house) - iced with sprinkles, covered with jam and dipped into dessicated coconut or formed into an elegant 'butterfly' with cream and cut-out 'wings' made from the cake top. Always a winner at our birthday parties, for a long time I only knew a recipe that made three dozen buns - with three sisters and a brother, cousins and friends from up and down our road at each party, no mere dozen was going to cut it.

I spent many an hour pouring over the cakes and desserts in Mam's much-thumbed All-Colour Hamlin Cook Book (a staple of the 1970s and 1980s in most Irish homes), picking out a new recipe and campaigning for the chance to make it for Sunday dessert or for the next birthday party. Chocolate Button Cake was always a popular choice among my siblings as a birthday or special occasion cake (and is still my youngest sister's cake of choice), while the delicious little Congress Tarts made many an appearance when visitors were coming for tea. I was hooked. I loved the magic of baking; taking simple ingredients and transforming them into something beautiful and yummy. I also loved the pleasure that people got from eating my cakes, not to mention my own rather sweet tooth...

Over the years, I have never stopped baking. Sometimes I would bake for a family occasion or to bring something to a friend's house for tea but more often, I would just bake for myself. Just to be clear, I LOVE cake.

As a child I don't think I even knew that shop-bought cakes existed and when I first encountered them, I was appalled at how awful they tasted: too sweet, with grainy-textured sponge and a scarily long shelf-life. To me there is simply no comparison between those industrial-scale baked products and home-made cakes. Freshly baked, hand-crafted cakes, made using ingredients that you can recognise and most importantly, made with love.

Apart from a brief emergency as a teenager, when my neighbour's cafe was let down by her regular baker and I stepped in to help out, I hadn't thought that I would ever bake cakes to sell. I finally caved to pressure from work colleagues a few years ago to make some of my Christmas biscuits and truffles for them to buy.

Since then, word-of-mouth has meant that my little bags of Christmas goodies have appeared under the tree in many a house across Dublin - and with the Christmas exodus from Dublin, the festive treats have found their way around the country (even as far a-field as Germany and Tokyo, where they went down a storm I'm told!). Demand for the Christmas baking led me to develop a list of Easter cakes and treats for sale, including the ever-popular Chocolate Fudge Cake, Easter Biscuits and Peanut-Butter & Chocolate Cups. From there it was just a short hop to wedding favour iced biscuits, commissioned cakes for birthdays, weddings and christenings and my very own cake website and baking blog. 

As with most baking blogs, you will find some of my favourite recipes, ingredients, tips and tricks, but I will also share my adventures as I continue my quest to find good sweet things to eat and fabulous new recipes wherever I go.