SMART COOKIE STILL SPOILS HER HUSBAND

Retiree using 3-D printer to make cookies in likeness of her spouse

Ubol de Ronde loves her husband Bert so much you sense she could eat him. Soon she will – well, the Bert whose likeness will be on a batch of hi-tech cookies she is planning to bake.

De Ronde, who lives with Bert at Metlifecare’s The Orchards retirement village in Glenfield, is one of 10 residents taking part in a project to bake cookies using 3-D printing.

The team will use a 3-D printer to make a cookie cutter then bake the cookies to give to family or friends – and de Ronde is planning to create a likeness of Bert’s face for her design.

“I still cook for Bert,” she says. “Every day I spoil him, I can’t help it, that’s just me. We met in Thailand in the 1970s and it was love at first sight.”

The cookie project, related to another at Metlifecare’s Highlands retirement village in Highland Park where participants will use CNC (computer numerical control) cutting on another village project, is demonstrating that retirement villages are not the rest homes of old but are full of engaged and dynamic people.

De Ronde fits the description. With a constant smile on her face, the retiree leapt at the chance to take part.

“I know how to cook and all my life has been about food but, with this project, I am keen to learn something new,” she says. “I still like to challenge myself.”

An expert in Thai cooking, de Ronde ran night classes in Auckland for over 30 years. But it wasn’t always like that.

As a child she lived with her parents in Bangkok’s Chinatown (her father was Chinese). Because her mother was an excellent cook - and the family had a maid to do a lot of the food preparation – de Ronde spent little time in the kitchen growing up.

In 1971 de Ronde, seventh in a line of eight siblings, was sent to New Zealand to study for a business diploma – a move which ultimately led her to a job at the World Health Organisation and, later, a career in administration in the finance industry in Auckland. It also, indirectly, led her to Bert.

At the time Bert and his brother, who had emigrated to New Zealand from the Netherlands, owned a pasta factory in Auckland. One of Ubol’s friends, a fellow Thai, worked part-time in the factory, fell in love with Bert’s brother and the pair planned a wedding in Thailand – an event both Bert and Ubol were invited to.

“I had met his brother before but not him, but it was love at first sight for us both,” she says.

For the next two years de Ronde worked hard to convince her parents Bert was a suitable match. “In those days,” she says, “not many Asian women married a white man, it was not easy for my parents at first.

“My father passed away while I was in Auckland studying and slowly my mum came to accept that Bert and I wanted to marry.”

Once settled into married life, she was faced with another conundrum: in those days the woman was expected to raise the children (the couple had a son and daughter), keep the household and do the cooking and cleaning – but she had never had to cook.

The solution was to go to her mother and older sisters for advice: “My mum was a great cook and started a Thai food business in the MBK mall in Bangkok which is still being run by the family today,” she says.

De Ronde took to the lessons so well and with such gusto she became a cooking expert herself – successfully running the Thai cooking classes around her day jobs, and appearing on television cooking shows.

“I started with classes at Mt Eden Normal Intermediate School and continued for four nights a week for 30 years before deciding I had had enough,” she says. “I kept at them even after I retired from my regular job when I was 55.”

These days Bert is wheelchair-bound and, to make it easier for Ubol to continue to care for him, they moved to The Orchards four months ago, after living for the last 11 years at their property in Whangaparaoa.

Now she is looking forward to the cookie project not only because it is a chance to learn something new – but to provide Bert with yet more yummy food: “He is my first priority and, you know, I have got his photo and I am going to use it to design and make a Bert cookie.”

De Ronde, who lives with Bert at Metlifecare’s The Orchards retirement village in Glenfield, is one of 10 retirees taking part in a project to bake cookies using 3-D printing