Meet the bakers

 

Hello and welcome to our new blog from the Baking Bees. So let’s begin, who are we? We are two friends who share a love of baking, Katie and Mary. Our friendship began when we met at work and started talking about our hobbies. We are nurse lecturers and work at a Scottish University teaching pre and post registration nursing students. We come from different fields of nursing , Katie is a Children and Young Peoples Nurse, and Mary is a Mental Health nurse, but our love of baking brought us together and baking has been a common interest and been by our side during our nursing careers. Our main reason for starting this blog is to share our love of baking with others. As individuals, we recognize and practice the importance of self-care as well as identify benefits baking can have on your mental health, with the end product of a tasty creative cake. So grab a cup of tea and let us begin by sharing our personal baking stories!

 

      We hope you enjoy love M & K

                                  X 

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Katie    

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During these unprecedented and unpredictable times being in isolation has allowed me to reflect on one of my passions in life. Baking.I have fond memories as a child with my mum, sister and granny spending hours in the kitchen together. My sister and I would both adorn our kitchen aprons, standing on stools ready to create our fairy cakes. The kitchen would be filled with laughter, love and music of three generations of women. Flour on the floor, empty egg shells on the unit and a wooden spoon ready to be licked all flashbacks of a happy childhood.

Through secondary school and university, baking wasn’t something I consciously kept up. It was only when I became a newly qualified nurse that reconnect with this hobby.

My career saw me working in an acute department with an extremely close multidisciplinary team. I cared for those who were planned admissions as well as those who found themselves requiring attention after a trauma or in a life threatening condition. During my career there were situations and cases which were traumatic for a variety of reasons. They affected me both physically and mentally and I recognised I needed to find a way to process my thoughts and feeling after these events.

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I was regularly part of an on call team, and after one particular challenging evening when all our efforts unfortunately could not save the life of our patient, my team and I undertook a debrief. As we were leaving the hospital at 4am my close consultant colleague asked me what I was going home to do. At first, I laughed as it was a silly question. I replied “home for a cup of tea and bed, you? “. He told me he was going home to bake a cake. When I questioned his reasons for this, he explained he needed time alone to process the evening. The art of concentrating on a recipe and being able to control what the outcome was, allowed him time to reflect. That morning I too went home and baked a Victoria Sponge cake and reflected.

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As nurses and midwives, we are encouraged and bound to be reflective practitioners. “Reflection allows you to make sense of a situation and understand how it has affected you. It allows you to identify areas for learning and development to include in your professional development objectives and supports sharing and learning from other professionals. Reflective practice is a way for you to consider how you can put changes or improvements into action in your everyday practice” (The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) (2020). From that morning, I continued to bake after challenging events or situation. Enabling me to ensure I reflected as well as look after my own health and wellbeing. Overtime it has now become a passionate hobby which is relaxing, fun as well as a personal professional reflective tool. Whether you’ve never baked before or only baked once we hope you will join us in creating and sharing your baking masterpieces.

 

 

Mary

 

Baking for me came in my later life when I was around 22. I always thought I was quiet a creative person, but not artistic and this was a barrier I put in place for myself for years. I attempted baking on a number of occasions, usually with the same hilarious outcome of my product being burnt, inedible or looking as if it had been dropped (which the teacher at my first ever cake decorating class thought all of the above).

 

Like most things, If I want to put my mind to it I can become quiet passionate about it and this is something that certainly happened when I started taking baking seriously. During my student mental health nurse years, this is when I really began baking and this was for a number of reasons. I baked because I enjoyed it, I loved making playlists- turning my music right up and turning the kitchen in utter chaos with flour, butter, sugar on every surface…including the roof. I loved creating, different tastes, colours, techniques. I loved making it for other people and awaiting their reactions when they tried it. I loved feeling pretty magnificent as I would step back from my bakes looking at my hands thinking “I made that”. I loved that baking brought connection. I would bake for neighbors, friends, friends of friends, charities, birthdays, whatever the reason I was happy to oblige.

 

For me baking was a release, a tool in my ever-growing toolbox to look after myself. I remember incidents of patients I had worked with who disclosed trauma, sadness, or loss. Often, I would walk home and find myself entering the flat and almost automatically reaching to the baking cupboard to be mindful, to distract myself I suppose. Over the years I have used baking as something to help me and my own wellbeing, and since this lock down I have rediscovered how much I enjoy it..and realized I have missed baking as much. It is even something I have used in practice recently in a rehabilitation ward when I baked with four patients who had never baked before. It is a skill that is transferable, that builds connection that allows for a therapeutic pause, that spreads a love, joy and kindness in this messed up world at the moment. So I invite you to pick up your apron, dust off the rolling pin and bake, share, create and most importantly have fun.

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