Ever since I went to Cardiff and bought homemade Biscoff Welsh cakes, I’d been wanting to make them myself. My son had also recently been to Hay-on-Wye and came back talking about how much he loved the proper Welsh bakeries there and how much he missed them.

Unfortunately I then got gastritis and couldn’t eat very much, so the idea had to sit on the shelf for a while.

Eventually I started to feel better. The proton pump inhibitor I took actually worked really well. Naturally, the universe responded to this improvement by immediately throwing me head-first into a cluster headache episode.

Between the attacks the night before, I couldn’t stop thinking about making Welsh cakes. My brain kept replaying memories of my nan buying me hot ones when I was little, handing them to me in a paper bag that warmed my hands while we walked through town.

So when I woke up the next morning I was absolutely determined to make them. It felt like one of those unskippable main missions in a video game.

Priority: Welsh Cakes.

Even waking up with a really bad shadow headache wasn’t going to stop me.

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The Missing Welsh Wooden Spoon

The first task in making Welsh cakes was to actually go and get the ingredients, and the tools I needed to make them. Living in a tiny open-plan flat means I don’t really have much cookware. There’s nowhere to put it. But it also means I’ve somehow been living without even so much as a wooden spoon, and that feels all kinds of wrong when you’re Welsh.

I had to go to Lidl anyway because my son and I needed bread, and I wanted to buy as much Red Bull as I could reasonably afford. It’s much more effective for pain relief during a cluster attack than coffee, despite having less caffeine than the coffee I normally drink. I don’t make the pain relief rules – my hypothalamus does. Apparently it prefers its caffeine with a side of taurine.

All I know is that during episodes I’ve drank enough of them to confirm they do not, in fact, give you wings.

I drank two coffees in the hope they would settle the shadow headache I’d woken up with and set off to Lidl, fully aware that the activity of going to Lidl would probably trigger an attack. It’s tempting to try to avoid all triggers because of how painful they are. But that would mean doing absolutely nothing for three months of the year, and I can’t live with the knowledge of that. So I push through.

It turns out I would be pushing through much more than I expected the moment I stepped outside my flat.

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Trauma on My Doorstep

It turns out you can’t avoid trauma triggers either. Two of mine were standing directly in my path on the way to Lidl.

My mother, and the man she’s with – the same man who harassed me in a club. Yes, she knew about that before she got with him.

The fact that I still bump into her at all is a leftover of her strange behaviour that my son and I still have to deal with. I tried to get away from her many times. I changed my surname and my son’s surname – she copied us. We moved house – she moved into a building next to ours. I have to walk that way to go anywhere. There’s no route around it.

I’ve talked about this before, but the condensed version is that my son and I went no contact with her because of her abusive behaviour. This was part of it: not letting me go, not allowing me to have my own life even when I was in my thirties. She tried to convince me I was co-dependent on her when it was actually the other way around, all while emotionally abusing me. The final straw was when she started directing that behaviour towards my son as well, and it was escalating.

I had to walk right past them. As in, within reaching distance. My brain froze for a moment. It felt like I was about to step over hot coals or jump off a cliff.

However, cluster headache episodes have one unexpected side effect: they make me extremely irritated and angry. So I turned up the volume on my noise-cancelling headphones, played Rebuild – my fight song – and walked past them like I didn’t know either of them. I had in fact like the song said, “Escaped the frame”. I reminded myself that I have no reason to feel guilt, shame, or remorse. If anyone should feel those things, it’s her. But they’ve never been emotions she’s had access to.

When I got inside Lidl – after having a trauma-based panic attack outside – I felt safer. But then I was immediately surrounded by corporate Mother’s Day displays. It made me feel sad, not just for myself but for my mother being the person she is.

Then I thought about my son, and that grounded me instantly. Mother’s Day is still special to me despite my mother because of him. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me, and being his mum has been the greatest privilege of my life. I smiled thinking about him, our relationship and how it is so different from what I experienced.

And I still wanted to make him some Welsh cakes. So I hunted down all the ingredients and tried to make them as Welsh as possible.

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Still Hunting a Wooden Spoon

I was hoping the middle of Lidl would randomly have cooking equipment, but unfortunately not. The helpful middle-of-Lidl items never exist when you actually need them. I guess that’s how the middle of Lidl works – I better buy it just in case I need it in the future. They also didn’t have baking powder or mixed spice. So after buying Welsh butter, Welsh milk, flour, and two types of sugar, I headed to Asda, which is luckily on the way back home.

By the time I got into Asda my shadow headache had really ramped up. It was getting quite bad and my head felt like it was underwater. I get this strange feeling like my head is too heavy for my neck, and my shoulders start hurting as well. My clusters are triggered by exertion and heat, and I was boiling while walking around pushing my suitcase full of Lidl ingredients.

At that point I realised I had to find some courage from somewhere if I was going to finish this mission.

Luckily Asda had everything, including a wooden spoon – although it had a silicone cover on the spoon part. My food-based germ anxiety approved of that very much. I also picked up a rolling pin, mixing bowl, and cooling rack because I genuinely didn’t have anything at all to cook with at home. I have no idea where I’m going to put all this stuff. I’ll have to play kitchen Tetris once the Welsh cakes are made.

Thankfully they also had the mixed spice, currants, and baking powder. I honestly don’t know how I managed not to forget anything, although I did have a list that I kept checking repeatedly. Cluster headaches turn my brain into Swiss cheese. It’s hard to think of anything.

The pain wasn’t letting up, so I skipped Greggs. Instead, the thought of downing a Red Bull when I got home gave me all the motivation I needed to get there.

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The Roblox OOOF

When I got home I put everything I needed to make Welsh cakes on the counter, then immediately went to lay on the sofa like a lady with plague in an old painting. I was absolutely exhausted and the shadow headache would not let up.

I did down the Red Bull, which helped a little, but I hadn’t slept much the night before thanks to the sheer volume of cluster attacks, and they make me exhausted anyway.

I kept looking over at the counter. Placing all the ingredients out like that had been an act of hope.

At the same time I was thinking about the audacity of people who say cooking from scratch is cheaper. I had just spent far more money on ingredients and equipment than the £1 pack of Welsh cakes I could have bought in the shop. I can probably only make two batches before I’d need more butter, which might as well be gold in this economy.

But I get these VERY IMPORTANT ideas, and once they appear I simply HAVE to carry them out. Thankfully, this time the hope wasn’t misplaced. Eventually the shadow eased just enough that I felt able to start. Welsh cakes are supposedly one of the easy things to make, and despite being absolutely terrible at cooking, I was hoping even I could manage it.

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Fergus the Baking Mascot

My son became very interested in what I was doing, although he doesn’t trust me much in the kitchen. There was one Pancake Day he has never let me forget. I made crepes that were somehow burnt and raw at the same time. The sugar had also gone wrong in some mysterious way, so he was convinced they were frozen.

He said I must be some kind of magician to produce frozen, burnt pancakes when nothing had even been frozen to begin with. He laughed so much. He still brings it up often.
“Remember when…”
I know immediately it’s going to be that pancake story. He’s even told his friends. Hilarious.

To help prevent history repeating itself, he gave me his Jellycat Fergus Frog as a baking mascot, in the hope that I wouldn’t produce frozen, burnt Welsh cakes.

I assembled all the ingredients, which was actually quite easy. I remember my Welsh nan cooking, and to me Welsh cooking has always been a bit like:
“That’ll do, love. I don’t use measures, I just shove it all in the bowl and hope for the best.”
Then somehow she’d make something that tasted incredible. No one I’ve met since has ever cooked quite like her.

I rubbed the butter into the flour with my fingers until it became a breadcrumb texture, which I really loved texture-wise… until I had to wash my hands every few minutes. While doing this I attempted to summon the DNA my nan had left me, hoping that would somehow guide the process.

I rolled the dough and cut bear shapes. Or frog shapes, if you ask my son. I put four into the pan and hoped they would at least resemble Welsh cakes. The first batch was a bit dry. I had made them a bit too thick and worried they were raw in the middle, so I cooked them longer. They were not raw. They were overcooked.

But once I reduced the cooking time for the next batch, they came out perfect. I shouted to my son from the kitchen:
“OMG THEY ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE WELSH CAKES WHAT THE HECK.”
He came running.

As soon as they cooled slightly but were still warm, he tried one. Then two more. For quality control purposes, obviously. He loved them. He said they were the best Welsh cakes. That made me ridiculously happy. Soon the entire cooling rack was full of bear-shaped Welsh cakes, and I had also eaten three myself.

I think my nan would be proud. Although realistically she’d probably say something more like:
“Forty-two and only just making Welsh cakes? And the rest! Better get in that kitchen!”
I suppose if I want to enter my Welsh Mam-gu era, I’d better.

My son kept repeating how much he loved them and even made some funny Instagram stories:
“Free rent and free frog Welsh cakes. I’m living the life.”
Of course my brain immediately started thinking about how I could improve them. There wasn’t quite enough mixed spice. And then I started thinking about pistachio ones. And Biscoff ones.

Uh oh. Am I about to hyperfixate on Welsh cakes?

Making them lifted both of us up so much. And I was just so happy that my son loved them. He’s a tough critic and very authentic, but I’ve always loved that about him. It means if he says something is good, he really means it. Hence the pancake incident of yore. He wasn’t about to not rip me to shreds because of social convention.

And for a moment, in the middle of cluster headaches, trauma, exhaustion, and not exactly the best mental health… I felt connected. To my son. To my nan. And to my best friend, who loved cooking and always encouraged me to try it as a way to help my ED, because it had helped her too.

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Welsh Cakes Are a Cure

First of all, Welsh cakes are not a cure. But for a moment, they felt like one.

I realised my mood had been lighter that day despite everything. I had the motivation to go out and get the ingredients and then actually make them, even though I was exhausted and very clustery. When I was making them I felt completely in the moment. There were no intrusive thoughts pulling me out of it like there have been with almost everything fun I’ve tried to do lately.

I’m trying not to question it too much and just enjoy it. It could simply have been a good day. Or maybe I was slightly delirious after clusters at 1am, 2am, and 4am the night before and a questionable quantity of Red Bulls. My mental health tends to be all over the place during cluster episodes.

When the cluster attacks arrived again that night, the Welsh cakes meant even more to me. Not just because I often get very loud hunger cues between attacks and now had a Welsh cake available whenever that happened, but because when you’re going through the worst pain of your life you need something to hold on to.

That’s one of the reasons I push through episodes and still try to do things. I need to know there are still things I can do and things I’m living for.

That night my reasons were Welsh cakes, my son being so happy, feeling connected to family, and remembering my best friend who always encouraged me to cook or bake. I never did it back then, but maybe I’m starting now.

I’ll post the recipe once I’ve perfected it. I’d like to experiment with the ingredients and try making them with half butter and half lard. Ours were very buttery – delicious – but I’m chasing the taste I remember for how much they meant to me.

Because in the end, that’s what food is supposed to be about, memory, connection and meaning.

Achievement Unlocked, Completed Priority : Welsh Cakes on Insanity Difficulty. 100G