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Illustration by Toby Morris
Illustration by Toby Morris

KaiJuly 7, 2018

Good Bitches Baking and the sweet, sweet taste of kindness

Illustration by Toby Morris
Illustration by Toby Morris

Alex Casey talks to Nic Murray and Marie Fitzpatrick, co-founders of Good Bitches Baking, about changing the world, one cupcake at a time.

It began, like all good things, with a warm cheese scone. Nic Murray’s baby nephew was battling cancer and it was a traumatic time for her whole family. One afternoon, she spent lunchtime crying in the toilets at work. “It was one of those days where I genuinely thought I’d run out of the ability to be anything at all, that I’d never be able to pull myself together.” She went back to her desk, ready to turn her computer off and leave, too tired to face the rest of the day.

And there it was.

Resplendent and buttery, a warm cheese scone in a cold hard world. A free scone. A gift scone. A desk scone. The greatest scone of all. “To this day, I have no idea who put it there, but it was such a kind gesture – someone noticed I’d been distressed, and tried whatever they could think of to make me feel better.”

Her co-founder of Good Bitches Baking, Marie Fitzpatrick, has a similar treat touchstone. When her daughter was born very premature, she found solace in a simple cuppa in hospital.

Marie Fitzpatrick and Nic Murray (Photo: Daniel Whiting)

“On the worst of days, a cup of tea from someone was enough to give the sense that not everything in the world was awful – you might even be able to get through the day. And if you get through that day, you might be able to get through the next one.”

If the cheese scone and the cup of tea planted the seeds for Good Bitches Baking, then it was a night of drunken shit-talking that gave it the necessary hosing to bloom. “There was a lot of depressing stuff happening around us,” Murray says. “In Wellington, there was a huge problem with homelessness and all the women’s refuges were having to turn people away.”

So she and Marie did what many do when they need to solve a problem: they turned to booze.

“It’s all very middle class and embarrassing, but we got hammered on pink bubbles and the conversation all night was us going, ‘Isn’t the world shit, why don’t we do something about it… baking is nice, we’ll make people happy with baking,’” Murray says, adopting a drunken slur. “We were sick of feeling helpless about the shit state of the world, so we thought we had to do something – even if it seems ridiculous, like baking someone a cake to make them happy. It’s better than doing nothing.”

Photo: Daniel Whiting

They settled on a name still drunk. Murray still stands by it. “I thought, ‘Well, you’re a good bitch, and I’m a good bitch, let’s call it Good Bitches Baking!” The next hungover morning, a Facebook group was made with 12 of their home baker friends. That was three years ago, with the group now boasting more than 1300 volunteers, 13 chapters nationwide and over 500,000 sweet treats lovingly baked and delivered to people in need of cheering up.

The weekly parcels of scones, slices, cakes and muffins reach people nationwide, from Women’s Refuge to homeless shelters, Rape Crisis support, local hospices, food banks, Canteen, post-natal depression support, Shakti groups and many more. “Really it’s just anywhere where there are people who are going through some sort of crisis or having a rough time,” Murray says. “We want them to know that life isn’t terrible, the world has nice people in it and those people care about them.”

Photo: Daniel Whiting

A big, delicious, baking run might sound frivolous to some, and even enraging to those who love to spit about the perils of sugar, but all that matters to Murray and Fitzpatrick is the person biting into a delicious morsel in the midst of a bad time. “Someone who’s received baking from us at the Women’s Refuge sent us a message saying, ‘I burst into tears when I got your cake because I was so touched that someone thought I was worth it’” recalls Fitzpatrick. “That made me cry my eyes out.”

“It’s such a simple thing for us to make a cupcake but, for someone else in the world, a simple gesture saying ‘you’re worth my time’ can be quite overwhelming.”

Another grateful recipient of Good Bitches’ baking was a woman who was receiving cancer treatment in another town and was away from all her friends and family. “She said she got home and there was a plate of cookies on the bench. She told us, in that moment, she didn’t feel alone,” Murray says. “That made me cry – but it doesn’t take much.”

“She’s a sook,” laughs Fitzpatrick.

It’s not just about the people on the receiving end either – the weekend ritual of home baking for others has attracted thousands of bitches nationwide (that’s a gender-neutral term, by the way, and if you don’t like it, well, Murray says you can “get fucked”).

“Lots of our bitches say that one of the things they like is the practicality of it and the personal nature of it,” says Marie. “They’re in their kitchen and they’re thinking about the person who’s going to get the baking and being mindful of what they are going through.”

Both still working full-time jobs as contractors in communication and product design, Murray and Fitzpatrick squeeze in the running of Good Bitches Baking around their regular lives. “Managing is probably the better description,” says Marie. “We’ve been tired for three years.”

Late nights and sugar rushes aside, there have been some sweet lessons along the way. “It’s taught me that if you give people a way to connect to something, they’ll take it,” says Murray. “Yeah, to me it’s the fact that 99 per cent of us are good bitches at heart, but most of us need a little bit of help to get there.”

So what’s next for the bitch brigade? They have plenty of home bakers across the country, but there’s one thing they still need: money.

“We also want to start having bigger conversations with people about the power of kindness,” says Murray. “We’ve got 1300 baking volunteers now, so we’re keen to look at what else we could do to make a difference in the community.”

They’re also keen to find ways to appeal to people who don’t like baking, before tackling the most ambitious task of all: making New Zealand the kindest place on Earth.

“We like to think that kindness is like crack,” Marie says. “We’re just the gateway drug.”

Click here to sign up or donate to Good Bitches Baking


The Spinoff’s food content is brought to you by Freedom Farms. Our relationship with food, the way we produce it, buy it and eat it, provides wonderful insight into our society and how it works. Freedom Farms reckon talking about food is nearly as much fun as eating it, and they’re excited to facilitate some good conversations around food provenance in Aotearoa New Zealand.

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London coffee feature

KaiJuly 5, 2018

Why is coffee in London so, so terrible?

London coffee feature

A displaced Wellingtonian yearns for the coffee culture she once derided.

“It’s coffee, but not as you know it.”

It made a greater impression on me than any advertising slogan on the side of a bus should. The fact, the bitter reality, was that a new kind of cold Nescafe in a can was besides the point when coffee as I knew it was already a distant memory. The bus, you see, was a red double-decker.

The years I lived in Wellington, I was scornful of the pride it took in its “coffee culture”. Coffee was a beverage, not a way of life. “It’s a drink; it doesn’t define you,” I tweeted scathingly to my 10s of followers in 2010. “The days of coffee being a status symbol went out in the 1990s.”

After a year in London, I see now that I was wrong.

I had considered myself above Wellington’s coffee culture, but in fact I was steeped in it. Coffee was not unimportant to me, far from it – I had just become accustomed to the high quality available across even small-town New Zealand, at cinemas or Wild Bean Cafes or, probably, Matthew Ridge’s Car-fe.

A coffee in Wellington, probably

Good coffee was everywhere. You didn’t have to performatively strive for it by grinding your own beans, or keeping a one-cup Swiss Gold filter at work, or packing an espresso machine for a bach holiday – all of which I did, by the way, despite my vociferous opposition to people who did so comfortably, with enjoyment and interest, and dared to talk about it.

What can I say – I was not very self-aware, and now my ironic punishment is to try harder and pay more for worse coffee. What I’d give for a flat white from the Wild Bean Cafe today. Here in London, even coffee at “good cafes” – as signalled by lowercase Helvetica, bearded baristas and extortionate prices – more often than not tastes acrid or milky; the foam can sometimes resembles a gob of saliva in the middle of your cup.

The reason why this is the case, in spite of a big enough population of expat Australians and New Zealanders to keep the Walkabout chain of themed pubs afloat, is unclear. I am told that the Brits use cheap beans and, particularly in London, are hampered by the chalk-heavy water. (Expect another 1000 words of complaining about my hair forthwith.) “But mostly it’s a skill thing, lots of misinformation and no desire to learn better technique,” a Wellingtonian told me on Twitter.

Every bit of this dismays me, I said.

“You know what dismays me?” he replied. “Costa’s idea of a latte.”

I have in fact found Costa – “the nation’s favourite coffee shop”, in the same ballpark as New Zealand’s Coffee Club – to be one of the better chains in light of the strange-tasting beans at Pret A Manger and the staff member posted at the front door to greet you personally at Starbucks. Its flat white is more of a latte, really, but they are far from alone in their confusion on that point.

No one seems to know what a flat white is, even the “Australian-style cafes” that pride themselves on having introduced “antipodean coffee culture” to the UK. “They don’t seem to get that the ratio of coffee to milk or water is the important thing,” an expat New Zealand barista explained, with typical understatement: in this case, it is literally the only thing.

The flat white does not need a family. The flat white is proud to walk alone (Photos: Elle Hunt)

I first went to get a flat white in London on the afternoon of my arrival, so consumed by jet lag and a cold I’d picked up on the flight over as to be on Mars. I’d heard about how legendarily bad coffee was in England, but took comfort from the fair-trade beans and tasting notes, signalling the level of pretension to which I’d become accustomed in the antipodes.

I asked for a flat white. I was told that they did not “do” flat whites – only white coffee or black coffee, by liquid volume.

“OK, then,” I said, squinting at the menu, which was very long yet somehow without any of the information necessary to complete this transaction, “I’ll have a ‘12oz white’.”

I chalked it up to one strange cafe, and also my possibly having hallucinated it – but this exchange turned out to be portentous of my time in London. There is a widespread, fundamental and cheery ignorance about what a flat white in particular actually is. (Ask for a long black, and receive a long stare and a long silence.)

But instead of Googling or phoning a friend Down Under, every company seems to have had a go at defining it itself. Costa Coffee has gone completely off-script, introducing its “Flat White Family” earlier this year with a claim so ludicrous you may be able to take it up with the consumer protection agencies: “It’s time the flat white had some competition”. The new generation in this dysfunctional “family”? The “coconut flat white”, the “flat mocha” and, perhaps most egregiously of all, the “flat black”.

The confusion has reached a point that one company is trying to capitalise on it, marketing its point of difference as “we just do good coffee”: McDonald’s.

Its television spots bemoaning “hipster coffee” served in a beaker for £8 were affronting enough – then I saw the billboards. “FLAT WHAT? IT’S JUST LIKE A STRONGER LATTE WITH LESS MILK.” (It isn’t. It has less foam.) In February McDonald’s gave away a free flat white to every reader of Metro like it was some kind of mad genius-billionaire, the Willy Wonka of coffee – yet Londoners are none the wiser.

Our intrepid correspondent finally finds a decent flat white, without having to resort to Costa’s “family” (Photos: Elle Hunt)

At least McCafe is cheap, ish. My hunt for good coffee was at risk of bankrupting me as I tried to find something resembling that at home, at any cost. Once I came upon an unfamiliar cafe with the tagline “WE DO BETTER COFFEE” and decided to take it at its word. This proved to be a mistake almost immediately, when the barista asked me if I wanted my flat white “small, medium or large”.

My heart sank, then my blood pressure spiked when I went to pay: £3.25, the most I’ve paid for a coffee, ever.

Against my better instincts, I broke my number-one rule of living in London: never convert to NZD. I had just paid $6.26 New Zealand dollars, or $5.82 Australian dollars, for a coffee of such calibre I might have considered returning in New Zealand, had returning coffees not been the number-one indicator of being an asshole.

It became clear that I couldn’t afford my habit, but the highs were no longer worth chasing. Given the choice between paying £3 for a beverage barely resembling coffee and getting one that is similarly removed from a machine at my work for free, I am increasingly opting for the latter. After a year, I am nearly as nonchalant about coffee as once I only claimed to be.

Still, once or twice a week, I take a different exit off the Tube, to go to the best cafe I’ve found within a half-mile radius of the office. Its flat white is 20p more than any other in the area: £2.80, or nearly $6 NZD. But it is a small price to pay for Allpress beans, the familiar brown and beige cup as familiar as a New Zealand flag – and the Kiwi barista.