Cakes which make a difference

Mental Health Nurse Maria Ditch bakes cakes which make a difference. Here she tells us the story behind her latest design, and why she wants to use cake to raise awareness of mental health issues.

All of my professional life I’ve been passionate about mental health. Since 1985, I’ve worked as a Registered Mental Nurse at Rampton Hospital - one of only three high secure hospitals in the country.

Working as a psychiatric nurse has given me a great understanding of complex illnesses that are unfortunately, still stigmatised. My work has also made the everyday pressure affecting everyone ever more obvious to me.

Alongside my full time job, I have a small cake business. Having this creative outlet helps manage the stress of nursing.

My love of baking started from an early age - I used to sit with my mum, watching, learning and helping her to bake the most delicious cakes.

One day a few years ago, I sat on the kitchen stool and baked. When I took the cupcakes into work, one of my colleagues said they were good enough to sell. Before I knew it, the orders came flooding in!

So, Dellissima Cakes was born. I informed my employer, registered with tax, got an environmental health rating of 5, excellent, and started unleashing my pent up creativity. It was delightful.

3 years ago, for the first time, I dared to enter the biggest cake competition in the world, Cake International, and was awarded Gold for my replica Valentino Rossi ‘5 Continents’ cake. Since then, I haven’t had the courage to enter again… until November 2016!

I struggled to come up with a design, but then I realised that I wanted my entry to make a difference, to provide a meaningful message. As a psychiatric nurse I’m only too fully aware of how much pressure we are exposed to, and how much stigma surrounds mental health issues, and so, my cake design took shape.

I wanted to show how I believe social media adds pressure and stress to our lives. Trying to keep up with it can be quite intrusive and difficult to escape.

I took phrenology, the study of the skull, and divided it into areas, fitting social media icons into the different areas depending on the different emotions I thought each type of social media would affect. I gave it a title, “PHRENOLOGY  #socialmediamind Under Pressure”

The building blocks and blackboard on the cake complete the message I’m trying to give with my hand-carved fruitcake design. All of the designs on the cake were hand carved too. Everything, apart from the cakeboard, is fully edible and made by me.
                                         
My design earned me a Silver award at the November 2016 Cake International, officially the biggest cake competition in the world, with over 1300 competition entries! The judge told me I was just a couple of points from Gold, and that he personally really liked my design, and that it gives such a strong message.

In the weeks since the competition, I’ve seen pictures of my cake all over social media. So many people have taken pictures of it, which is brilliant because it helps reduce the stigma around mental health issues.

Today there is much less stigma surrounding mental health than when I first started nursing back in the mid-80s, but we’ve still got a long way to go.

You can see more pictures of Maria's cake on her website.