IN THE KITCHEN WITH KATJA
WORDS BY RINALDA AAY
I spend a morning in the house of my new friend, Katja Fuhrmann, watching her bake as we talk about her new side-business of German-inspired cakes and pastries with a vegan twist.
Anyone who says baking is an art of precise measurement has never seen Katja Fuhrmann bake. Until this morning, I hadn’t either. I stand in her kitchen, hovering awkwardly, observing as she tosses together this cake as deftly as if she’s done it a hundred times. Which she probably has.
There’s a rug stretched over the hardwood floor; Kat’s bare feet are well at home on the faded surface. A microwave sits high above the fridge and the small canvas Dr Who clock on the wall is stuck at quarter to ten. Kat chatters as she works; melting and adding coconut oil, describing her processes, talking about her new American housemate.
‘I usually just add everything until it feels right,’ she says. As if to prove her point, she tips in a heaping of flour and showers in some sugar. Not a grain falls outside the bowl.
If it hadn’t been raining, Kat would’ve taken me out to the garden to pick my own lemons. I think the novelty would’ve almost been worth the wet feet. Bright puckery fruit lie already harvested on the bench, basking in the yellowy kitchen light. Kat slices into a lemon; it falls apart in a perfect cross-section, crisp and glossy and segmented. She squeezes the citrus over a cup and fishes out the seeds with nimble fingers. The cup is upended over the mixing bowl, powdery flour and sugar cratering as the juice seeps in. She stirs, adding a spoonful of water here and there to coax the mixture to a smooth, sticky consistency. Then, lemon zest. Little curls of rind peel away from the grater and drift like falling leaves onto the batter. And now it’s into a pan and ready to cook.
‘She tips in a heaping of flour and showers in some sugar. Not a grain falls outside the bowl.’
With the cake in the oven, we get comfortable in the lounge room to talk. Despite the perfectly good couch against the wall Kat sits cross legged on the floor, so I join her. I absorb the room in pieces—the artfully-arranged posters, the blue plastic stegosaurus on its own dedicated shelf, the tiny cactus in a painted cement pot—that share house amalgamation of possessions and personalities. Kat tells me her cakes are just a hobby, a side-project to help fund her next visa. When she’s not baking and selling vegan (optionally gluten-free) cakes based on her family’s German recipes, she’s studying public relations at Deakin University.
‘I’ve been baking pretty much all my life,’ she says. ‘When I was growing up we would always bake, especially around Christmas, because Germans love their Christmas cookies. It was just a family thing and I always enjoyed it.’ We laugh as she recalls one year’s Star Wars–themed gingerbread house, the one with Yoda standing, green and confused, in the front yard. I notice her Princess Leia purse perched on the side table.
‘The vegan cakes came around … well, because, I’ve got the family recipes and I’ve got the German baking in my blood a little bit, but … when I go home there are a lot of situations where my family will have cake but I can’t eat any of it. So I thought, okay, I have to find a way to combine these things.’ And combine them she did.
Surprisingly—or perhaps not surprisingly, this being food-obsessed Melbourne—Kat has no problem sourcing customers. ‘Well, obviously, German cake is hard to find, so people are interested in what it’s going to taste like, and that sort of thing. And then vegan and gluten free and foreign cake is kind of a non-existent product in the market, I guess.’
A while later my phone timer goes off, loud in the confines of the small living room. We unfold ourselves from the floor and return to the kitchen. The whole room smells tart and homey. Kat plucks a Dr Who tea towel in lieu of an oven mitt, opens the oven and reaches inside. When she pulls out the cake it’s bright and golden and glowing.
Olivia Morffew