my creative escape

Our household has been pretty chaotic of late. With work, school, volunteering and medical issues - we haven’t had time to scratch ourselves.

One thing I miss dearly… baking. I haven’t baked since my daughter’s birthday. That was three months ago. THREE MONTHS! Before Christmas, our house on weekends would be filled with the smell of fruit cake, cupcakes, Anzac biscuits or gingerbread. And I reckon this situation is going to continue for a while, thanks to my extremely busy engineering job.

There will always be baking for birthdays: the kids end up with over-engineered cakes that I have a lot of joy in planning and decorating. Furthermore, my mother’s [secret] cake recipes are awesome, and they go down a treat! One of mum’s recipes has been handed down 4 generations, and others are contained in this very old cookbook she still has...I’ll tell you about that one later.

Lucky for me, my mum’s favourite (and most active) hobby was cake decorating. I always had amazing cakes for my birthday… and I loved watching mum doing her craft. Same as container gardening​, mum did night-school with teacher ‘Leila’, who later became her best friend. Some wedding cakes mum produced won first prize at the Perth Royal Show!

Over the years, I would watch her painstakingly decorate almost every cake, hoping to learn the skills via osmosis. But when I eventually gave it a go myself, my fondant roses looked like pink cabbages.

These days, mum doesn’t do much cake decorating. Sadly, her involuntary tremors have become so severe that cake decorating is impossible. Last time I was in Perth, she handed down almost all her decorating equipment to me…

I’m stoked to be taking on mum’s craft and making it my own! Here’s a selection of my favourites so far:

Very wet weather has made it impossible lately to go outdoors and enjoy a bit of gardening, so in recent weeks I decided to do a bit of gardening indoors. I’ve always been an ‘outdoors’ gardener, but I thought I’d have a crack at a few indoor projects.

When I was in primary school, I remember my mum doing a container gardening course through TAFE in Perth. The only reason why she did it was because she couldn’t keep plants alive. So for 10 weeks, she attended night-school to learn all about pot plants, hanging baskets, and how to care for them! By the time she completed this course, mum was potting up a storm and I was watching everything she was doing.

I went to my favourite garden centre last week and found a few plants that I couldn’t resist! Rosary Vine (Ceropegia woodii, above), Peace Lily (Spathiphyllum sp.), and Hare’s Foot Fern (Davallia sp., below)…

Amazingly, they’re pretty hardy. All of them. But just make sure you read up a bit on each of the indoor plants you decide to buy: they’ll have preferences for watering, light conditions, soil type, and drainage.

Other than having a pretty, green living thing in your house, it also cleans the air you breathe. I potted a Pygmy Date Palm last year and put it in the bedroom. At the end of each day, that ‘stale breath’ smell has gone from the room! Some indoor varieties are better than others at doing this, the best being Snake Plant (Sansevieria sp.). NASA has even studied their effectiveness at cleaning indoor air.