For about 65 years, 92-year-old Martje Derks-Lautenbach has been baking in the kitchen every week. She makes cookies, foam balls, butter cake and especially apple pie. “I’ve already baked about a thousand cakes in total,” she says with a laugh. By the way, she does not eat the treats herself. She mainly distributes them to relatives and friends.
Today is World Baking Day. Something Derks-Lautenbach has never heard of. World baking day or not, Derks-Lautenbach enjoys baking. “I’ve done it all my life. I always enjoy it,” she says. But what keeps her baking every week? She doesn’t really know herself either. “Because everyone always likes it too, maybe?”
De Emmense always has all the ingredients to make a new baking. The eggs, flour, vanilla sugar, lemon zest and butter are not missing today, despite the fact that she made two new snacks yesterday: an apple pie and a butter cake.
In the cupboard there are biscuit boxes with home-baked snacks and the freezer is full of also home-baked cake. The top drawer of the freezer is full of bags of sliced apple. “It only takes me a while to make an apple pie,” explains Derks-Lautenbach. Apple pie is what she bakes the most. “Then I can take the apples out of the freezer and I’ll be ready in ten to fifteen minutes.”
Anyone who thinks that it will become a soggy apple pie from the moisture that the apple retains is wrong. After all these years, Derks-Lautenbach has found its way.
And, a cake or cookies never fail, claims the baker. “I’m very precise about everything. I never have anything sour or broken, no.” She doesn’t actually know what Derks-Lautenbach’s baking secret is. “I don’t have any secrets,” she laughs.
Watch the video with Martje Derks below: