I have made over 25,000 cakes.
I don’t say that to impress you. I say it because after a certain point, the number stops being a statistic and starts being something else entirely. A record, a responsibility, a quiet archive of other people’s most important days.
Weddings, Christenings, Birthdays with too many candles to count. First birthdays where the guest of honour had no idea what was happening, and ninetieth birthdays where they remembered everything. I have learned something from every single one of them.
But there is one cake I will never stop thinking about.
Her name was Rachel.
I first met her when she asked me to make her wedding cake. She had an energy about her — the kind that fills a room without trying. Warm, bright, completely herself. A few years later she came back for her child’s first birthday cake, then her second child’s first birthday cake. And then one afternoon she appeared at the studio door with her mum and that big beaming smile, she had come to order a cake for her husband’s birthday.
The cake was due in a few weeks.
The weekend before collection, a friend of hers got in touch. Rachel had died. It was her wish that her husband would have his birthday cake to share with their children.
A couple of days later, another of her friend’s called asking me to make a cake for her Celebration of Life.
Despite having made over 25,000 cakes this was a first for me, so I set to work because that is what I do. I show up for people with my hands, my skills and everything I have, even when, especially when, my heart was breaking.
Rachel left two young boys, a devoted husband, family and friends who loved her completely. She was so young. She was so full of life. And I had held the markers of that life in sugar and flour and hours of quiet, careful work. Her wedding. Her children’s beginnings. And then, in the end, her goodbye.
People sometimes ask me why cake matters. Why have I given thirty years to a craft that the world seems increasingly happy to treat as an afterthought — something to order cheaply, something to approximate at home, something disposable.
I think about Rachel when they ask.
Cake has survived centuries not because it is complicated, but because it is true. It is there at every moment that matters. It is made by hand, given with intention, received with feeling. At its best it is an act of love made visible — something that took skill, time and care and said, without words, you are worth this.
That is not throwaway. That has never been throwaway.
What worries me — and I say this not as complaint but as genuine concern. It is that the skills required to make something truly worthy of those moments are quietly disappearing.
Not dramatically, not all at once. Just gradually, the way things erode when nobody is watching. Techniques that took masters years to develop. Skills that required apprentices to be humble, to be patient, to understand that the learning came before the doing. Crafts passed from hand to hand across generations, each one requiring devotion and time and a willingness to begin at the beginning.
I had to hunt for some of what I know. That is how it should be. That is how it is transmitted properly.
I am not interested in gatekeeping. I am not interested in making people feel small for having a go. I am interested in mastery, in the long game, in the quiet satisfaction of doing something properly because it deserves to be done properly.
Rachel deserved that. Every person who has ever stood in front of a cake made with real skill and felt something — deserved that.
Twenty five thousand cakes have taught me one thing above all else. A cake made with love, however simple, is never a small thing. The gift of it, the intention behind it, has always been precious.
But there is another kind of making. One that takes years to learn, decades to master, and a devotion to tradition that does not come easily. The artistry. The sugarcraft. The skills passed from hand to hand across generations that allow a cake to become something more than nourishment — a work of art made in service of the most important moments in a human life.
Those skills are disappearing. Quietly, gradually, while the world looks elsewhere.
After twenty five thousand cakes I know this with certainty. They are worth fighting for.
Suzanne Thorp is the founder of The Frostery in Saddleworth, with thirty years of experience in traditional sugarcraft. She has appeared in four series of Channel 4’s Extreme Cake Makers and serves as a judge at Cake International. She is currently developing The Frostery Royal Icing Mastery Programme for cake decorators who want to learn the craft properly. Sign up here to join the waitlist.