Our place: Smells of baking fill kitchen

Danielle Cook shares a small character home in Bellevue with husband Cahn and their bull mastiff, Cash, and chihuahua, Bentley. The kitchen is Danielle's favourite space. She loves to cook and bake and has made a very successful business out of creating wholesome, handmade cakes.

I love this little house. When we bought it two years ago it was terribly mismatched. We've spent a lot of weekends working on it. There were five layers of wallpaper to strip off and the walls were all different colours.

It takes time to get it the way we want it but we're nearly there. Only the floor is work in progress. It's also our biggest challenge. But Cahn works in the building industry so that helps. We both love the exterior of the house and the Art Deco look and feel throughout.

It was built in the 1950s and the bedroom and the kitchen in particular are very spacious. The kitchen is my favourite as I love baking and cooking.

We were married just two months ago and one of the wedding presents was a pasta-maker. It's well used in this house. I like to cook all sorts of meals, especially European dishes.

The kitchen has no pantry so the huge kitchen cabinet is very special. It came from an old Victorian house that Cahn was working on and the owners were getting rid of everything.

It's made of native wood so it's very heavy and it took a lot of muscle to move it.

I bake my cakes in a commercial kitchen in Greerton, but I do a lot of testing and experimenting at home. It's important to me to use fresh local produce and Nona's cakes are made the old-fashioned way and are allergy friendly.

The ingredients are pure and whole. I use unbleached flours, unprocessed natural sugars, organic butter, and free-range eggs. People order cakes through my website, nonascakes.co.nz, and I also have a stall at the Little Big Markets, which is really great.

That's also where I have picked up most of the artwork and prints that are on the walls. All that's in the house is a mix of the old and new. There are a lot of items that belonged to our grandparents and there are some great stories behind those.

My little cakes business is called Nona's Homemade Cakes, and Nona is a word a lot of people associate with grandmothers. Funny enough, Nona was my grandmother's real name.

I never had the chance to meet her but apparently I am very much like her. I have no idea where I get my love for baking from, but I think it may have come from her.

- As told to Martine Rolls