About Nat

I was born to bake. After my first butter cake at the age of seven (a tender age, definitely NOT tender cake), baking became my one true love. In my teens, Vogue Entertaining sat beside Smash Hits magazine on my bedside table. I was besotted with pictures of chocolate roulades with mascarpone as much as gazing upon John Taylor from Duran Duran’s extraordinary cheekbones! At eighteen I got my first commercial kitchen job as an apprentice chef and started absorbing knowledge like a tres leches sponge absorbs the milk. I started in the entree/salad section but just couldn’t deny the fact that my heart was all things sweet and kept moving towards the pastry section.

In 2011, after twenty years of baking in countless restaurants, cafes and my first wholesale cake business, I was 38 years old and thought my dreams of having that dreamy little cake shop were over. Then one day, I found a very small shop on a sunny corner in North Melbourne near my home. I named it Beatrix Bakes. The name Beatrix has two meanings: in Latin it means ‘voyager’ but the Dutch meaning is ‘she who delivers joy’ and that was exactly what I wanted my cake to do!

The primary inspiration for the bakes at my shop came from the vanilla slices, apple turnovers, lamingtons, swiss-roll sponge cakes and towers of coloured meringues at Australian country bakeries. I mixed this with homages to classic European cakes and bakes: black forest cake, mascarpone layer cakes and bienenstich. And added spoonfuls of American heritage baking inspiration - towering chiffon cakes, layer cakes and fruit pies. If it was sweet, Beatrix was into it! I was connected to an ethos of seasonal fruit, fresh full-fat cream, real unsalted butter and free-range eggs. Creativity and good ingredients always underpins every gram of anything that is whisked, kneaded, baked, fried or sprankled in my kitchen.