Steel magnolia
Viewed from the outside, Bernadette Gee’s life seems entirely awesome. The talent behind successful cakery Magnolia Kitchen, she is beautiful, with her trademark shock of bright red hair. She has a massive 215,000 Instagram followers and people from all over the world beat a path to her café in Silverdale, 40 minutes drive north of Auckland. Her famous fudges and marshmallows are in demand internationally, her wedding cakes are coveted and her first book, Magnolia Kitchen, was so successful it was a challenge to print enough copies.
But Bernadette – or Bets for short – isn’t interested in pretending to be any more awesome than the rest of us. She is all about keeping it real. And so in the introduction to her new book, Magnolia Kitchen Design, Bets shares with absolute openness the story of the depression that seemed to strike her out of the blue.
“I’ve never experienced anything like that before,” she says. “I was totally unprepared for it.”
We are sitting in the new Magnolia Kitchen, an airy space in Silverdale village where there is a flower boutique, as well as a sweet café and
