Natalie Paull

Nat was born to bake. After her first butter cake at the tender age of seven, it was all she wanted to do. In her teens, she bought Vogue Entertaining instead of Smash Hits magazine, besotted with chocolate roulades with mascarpone and balsamic-tossed strawberries more so than Duran Duran and Bananarama. By eighteen she was an apprentice cook, a babe in the (commercial kitchen) woods, absorbing kitchen knowledge like a tres leches sponge absorbs the milk. She cooked savoury and pastry sections but just couldn’t deny the fact that her heart just loved all things sweet.

The shop:  The primary inspiration for the bakes at Beatrix come from the vanilla slices, apple turnovers, lamingtons, swiss-roll sponge cakes and towers of coloured meringues at country bakeries. Speckled throughout the repertoire are homages to classic European cakes and bakes: black forest cake, mascarpone layer cakes and bienenstich. If it’s sweet, Beatrix is into it! There is an ethos of seasonal fruit, fresh cream, real unsalted butter and free-range eggs that underpins all the creativity. 

In 2011, Nat found a very small shop on a sunny corner in North Melbourne and named it  Beatrix Bakes. The logo is two upright old-fashioned rotary beaters, which represent the call to arms baking has been for her and the homely bliss of small-batch baking. The name is a play on the suffix –trix, which was once used to form words like aviatrix (female avaiator). Nat is a female beater and thus beat(e)rix. Beatrix, in Latin, means ‘bringer of joy’. And that is, simply, what cake should do and what she and her team endeavour to bring every day. 

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