Doreen Rankin displays a cake decorated for Easter.

Doreen Rankin has been baking and decorating cakes for all occasions on Cayman Brac for close to forty years.

She makes cakes for weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, baby showers, bridal showers, Valentines Day, Mothers’ Day, Easter and Christmas. She makes both light cakes and a cross between and English and a Jamaican fruit cake from an old family recipe.

She first became interested in decorating cakes when her Aunt Vedette Telford came to visit from Jamaica. While she was on Cayman Brac, she would make beautiful cakes, and young Doreen watched her carefully.

“My aunt did stars and borders. The roses, sweet pea and lilies I taught myself,” she said.

Nowadays, there are plenty of different cake pan shapes to choose from, and for children’s parties she does everything from teddy bears, Barbie, Big Bird, Power Rangers and cartoon characters like the Little Mermaid. Barney is still popular, she said.

Sometimes she improvises using several different pan shapes put together to make special order cakes, but always they are decorated with the same deft hand, and each one takes just five hours, from start to finish.

Ms Rankin used to sometimes make four or five in a day, especially at weekends, but her father is now sick and she has cut down to about one per week. However, at Christmas, she is still busy, she said.

She is teaching some of the younger women to follow in her footsteps and is pleased that one young lady, Christina Christian, has gone even further.

Having caught the cake decorating bug from Ms Rankin, Ms Christian went to school in Chicago to learn professional cake decorating, and now has her own business on Grand Cayman.

At primary school Ms Rankin learned the art of crochet, and this has become another great pleasure for her. She continued to teach herself different techniques and would crochet in the evenings and sometimes at work in BB Grant’s store.

“I worked for thirteen years in the grocery store. It was quiet in the afternoons and that was mostly when I did my crochet and embroidery,” she said.

The skill learned over time produced very fine work, some of which was on display at the Heritage House last week.

Ms Rankin is also an accomplished pianist, and plays regularly at the Church of God Holiness in Spot Bay and sometimes at Watering Place, and also at funerals and, once in a blue moon, at weddings.

She teaches a few students, but believes you have to really love music. As well as church music, Ms Rankin said she loves classical music, and one of her favourites is Johann Sebastian Strauss’ famous waltz, the Blue Danube.

Her father bought her first piano back from North Carolina in the 1950s, but she found she needed a new one about fifteen years ago. For a brief period in between, she had nothing to practice on.

“I missed it. I taught a lot of students on my first one. I can’t imagine being without a piano now,” she said.

nicky@caymannetnews.com