“I have always said I cannot bake unless I bake with love, otherwise somehow it just doesn’t work!” exclaims Lynne Michel. It’s an inherited trait. The smell of a chiffon cake baking in the oven filled her childhood home in Cape Town, South Africa with vanilla sweetness, warmth, and love. “Baking was always central to our family. My granny Bessie taught my mum Marjorie to bake and they both taught me. In turn, we stood hands deep in flour and sugar with my children. Now I have the pleasure of baking with my grandchildren,” she adds 

Bessie was born in London to immigrant parents from Riga, Latvia and lived with her family above a pub in Whitechapel where her father was the owner. She became a domestic science teacher at the Jews’ Free School, married, and had a daughter, Marjorie. Growing up in Northwest London surrounded by friends and cousins, Marjorie learned to cook and bake from her mother. 

Many of her cousins immigrated to South Africa and in the late 1940’s Marjorie boarded a boat to visit them, carrying her mother’s baking lessons with her. It was there that she met Philip Ruch, fell in love, and decided to stay. 

Philip was born Faivel Ruchocki in 1911, near Pinsk, Ukraine (in what is now Belarus). He and his two brothers were orphaned and were among the 200 Jewish children rescued from war and poverty by the Jewish philanthropist Isaac Ochberg. Philip arrived in South Africa in 1921 and lived in the Cape Town Jewish orphanage. With the assistance of Ochberg (known as “Daddy Ochberg”) he moved to the countryside where he met his surrogate family.

Marjorie and Philip married and had three children. While Philip was a successful timber and hardware merchant, Marjorie became a stalwart of the local Jewish community. She was active in the women’s guild at the local synagogue, baking for Shabbat meals and special occasions in the 1960s from a beloved Betty Crocker recipe book. 

Philip was a generous businessman who would accept payment in kind if it helped a community member — including a basket of eggs. Lynne laughs as she recalls adjusting the Betty Crocker chiffon cake recipe to accommodate the double yolks from those backyard chickens. When her granny Bessie visited for months at a time, “We’d bake — three generations side by side in the kitchen,” Lynne explains. “My mother had a metal scoop that measured a perfect half cup, and her mother’s special palette knife that cleanly cleaved the cake from the tin. She had a serrated cake knife that was set aside to cut the cake.”

South Africa in the 1970’s was a tumultuous place. The country was in turmoil and as a university student, Lynne protested against the Apartheid regime and vowed she wouldn’t raise a family there. Like her mother before her, she gathered up her family recipes, beloved baking tins, and equipment, and set off for new life. In 1983 she joined her older brother in Sydney. Her sister came a few years later and finally, their parents both emigrating for a second time, followed suit.  

In Australia, with four young children of her own, Lynne refined her version of the signature chiffon cake. Friends and family would celebrate housewarmings, births, and simchas with it on the table. And, soon, she was baking it and bulkes (sweet yeast buns) for a local delicatessen. “I’d bake late at night after the kids went to sleep and wake up at 4 a.m. to prep the cakes for collection,” Lynne says. “The kids would gather like seagulls for any rejects that didn’t make the cut.”

While you won’t find her cakes in the local deli anymore, she still makes them for simchas and special events. Her housewarming gift of a platter bearing her chiffon cake is prized as much now as it was 30 years ago. 

Today, Lynne stands side by side with her children and grandchildren in their Sydney homes and shares her love of baking. Together they measure a perfect half cup of sugar using great-granny Marjorie’s scoop and ready her cake tin. As the cake bakes, they get great-great-granny Bessie’s palette knife ready and set out the cake stand. 

Granny Marjorie, now 99, is guaranteed the first slice, cut with her serrated knife that travelled from Cape Town to Sydney. As for the next slice, her grown-up children are not above fighting each other and her grandchildren for it. Very rarely is a piece left over for tomorrow.