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Meet the Leeds Easter egg makers
Husband-and-wife baking team Mark Shipway and Nang Kham Mai are snowed under at this time of year creating hundreds of Easter eggs.
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They run the specialist chocolate and cake making business, Cutting Cake Patisserie, from the family home in Meanwood where they live with their four-year- old daughter Lao Noom and son Saiy Lieng, 2.
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The couple met when they both took a bakery course at Thomas Danby College in Leeds. Formerly a librarian, Mark decided to take a huge change in direction after his first wife, Anne, died in 2001.
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Rod McPhee found out how baking gave him a new life.
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"The thing I'm most proud of must be the business. My wife and I met seven years ago, got married a year later and started Cutting Cake three years ago.
"I worked at Leeds University library for about 15 years and I was married before but nine years ago my first wife died. It was a period where I reassessed what I wanted to do and whether it was an opportunity to do something different.
"Anne had been ill since we met. She had an auto-immune disease which attacked her kidneys. She had renal failure and underwent three kidney transplants which lasted various lengths of time. In the end she was very ill and had a heart attack.
It ended up being a big turning point in my life and when I think about life before and after it's totally different now.
My second wife came to the UK from Burma to learn some baking skills then go home basically, but then we met at college and that was it. My life entered a whole new chapter.
My philosophy on life is to treat people as you'd like them to treat you. The more you give, the more you'll get back eventually. I think that's been my experience of life and I believe society moves on when everyone co-operates.
For example we do a lot of farmers markets and when you get there everyone helps each other set up their stalls and there's a lot of camaraderie between stall holders.
The best piece of advice came from my parents who always taught us to put others ahead of our-selves – don't think of yourself all of the time. The trouble is in our business you have to be a bit competitive – particularly when you can buy Easter eggs for 1 in the shops – we charge a little bit more but make sure we do something a little bit special, inject a bit of humour into what we do.
I grew up in Edinburgh which is one of those cities you don't necessarily appreciate until you've left and gone back to see it differently. Where we were living there was a lot of new houses being built and we used to get things off the building sites – you know, wood for goal posts and building huts in the woods or stealing sand to mark out football pitches. It didn't particularly seem like the wrong thing to do at the time.
I can't remember anything bad about growing up in Edinburgh. I'm not from a rich family but we didn't want for anything and it's a lovely city. We were lucky because we didn’t live in one of the housing schemes like you see in films like Train-spotting – but every city has that mixture of rich and poor.
One of the best things about Leeds is the green spaces here. I used to work at the university and go over Woodhouse Ridge first thing in the morning and it was a great start to the day – you’d hardly know you were in a city. Coming from Edinburgh and having lived in Manchester I’d have to say it must be one of the greenest cities in the country. It’s nice to think that the kids will have lots of open spaces where they can run around in some safety.
The person I’d most like to meet is Brian Keenan, one of the people taken hostage in Beirut in the late 80s. He was held hostage for about four or five years. I read his subsequent book, An Evil Cradling, and it made a big impression on me. It’s all about how he coped with being held hostage -–I have a lot of admiration for him.
The one thing I couldn’t live without is the radio. I listen to it all the time. When I’m working I like to have the sound in the background, but I couldn’t have something on distracting like TV, besides there are often more interesting things on the radio than the TV. I listen to Radio Four, I like sport so listen to Radio Five and Talk Sport.
The last time I cried was when the team I support, Hibs (Edinburgh’s Hibernian Football Club) got knocked out of the Scottish cup in a replay the other week. They haven’t won it since 1902 – it’s one of the things I’d like to see before I die, but I’m not sure it will ever happen!
If you’re running your own business and have small children you don’t get much time to relax. If I’m not working I like to read or cook, but I genuinely relax by playing with the kids or reading to them. I like to think I’m quite a hands-on dad – but probably think I’m much more hands-on than I actually am.
My first kiss was a girl called Caroline Willis. We weren’t at school together we just lived in the same area in Edinburgh – I was 15 which is quite late, but I was always quite shy – I’m still quite shy really.
My most embarrassing moment? Probably when people read this interview.
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Weather for Leeds
Thursday 24 May 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: 10 C to 23 C
Wind Speed: 12 mph
Wind direction: North east
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 16 mph
Wind direction: East
