HI-TECH A PIECE OF CAKE… OR COOKIE

Woman who didn’t cook now using 3-D printer for baking

Awoman who once did little or no cooking is now using a 3-D printer to bake cookies.

Sounds like something any normal millennial would do. Thing is, Fran Woods is not of that generation. In her mid-70s and living in a retirement village, she pre-dates the baby-boomers.

But Woods, who lives at Metlifecare’s The Orchards village in Glenfield, has put her hand up for a high-tech cookies project – an exercise in which a team of residents will use a 3-D printer to make a cookie cutter then bake cookies to give to family or friends.

To help, the team will receive training in the necessary new-age techniques at The Mind Lab by Unitec.

Woods is not fazed by change: “People my age have been through, and seen, huge change and I’ve always been someone who likes to keep up,” she says. “I never envisioned the day I would see children in push-chairs looking at a screen.”

For years she worked as a personal assistant at various companies in Auckland and readily took to computers when they started being introduced into the workplace in the 1980s.

“I like using computers and prefer them to the old typewriters we used to use – I used to have trouble changing the ribbons, especially on the electric typewriters.”

The Orchards’ project will be carried out by a team of 10 residents and is related to another project at Metlifecare’s Highlands retirement village in Highland Park where participants will use CNC cutting in another village project.

Woods, whose husband Richard passed away nine years ago, moved to The Orchards last November from her home in the nearby North Shore suburb of Forrest Hill. She has joined the project in part to prove people in retirement villages don’t sit around doing nothing all day.

Not that she has to. Most days she takes to the village swimming pool for a workout; she is a Justice of the Peace and runs appointments at either the village or the local Citizens Advice Bureau; she plays golf croquet, acting as secretary of the Takapuna club; on the day we met – her birthday – she was getting together with family in the afternoon and eating out with friends in the evening; now she has the cookie project.

Change – and innovation – has always been part of Woods’s life.

Born in Wellington, at 13 she moved with her family to Kawerau where her father worked as a maintenance engineer at the Tasman Pulp and Paper mill. But small town life was not for her and when an opportunity came to work as a librarian at the air force base in Hobsonville in Auckland, she grabbed it.

“It was a way of moving out of small towns and most people I knew in the air force also came from similar places,” she says. “It was a good job and I made life-long friends. A group of us from those days still get together every year for a Christmas dinner.”

Woods met Richard at the air force – he was an armourer – and soon settled down to married life and raising a family (the Woodses had two children, a boy and a girl). Her husband remained in the air force for 25 years and eventually found work as a dangerous goods inspector for local authorities in Auckland, including the old Mt Roskill Borough Council.

As a newly-wed Woods faced challenges: “I’d never done much cooking because my mother used to do it when we were kids,” she says “while in the air force we ate at the base mess a lot. But I left my air force job after three years so went back to mum and my sister to learn and after that I always baked.

“I did a bit of sewing thanks to my mother’s influence. She made a lot of our clothing because after the war there wasn’t a lot of choice and we had to make it ourselves – there were lots of hand-me-downs,” she says.

Woods says she is fascinated by the cookie project and is excited at the idea of learning something new. She has also enlisted the help of her 13-year-old grand-daughter Ella, who has promised to design a cookie shape for her to bake.

“Woods, who lives at Metlifecare’s The Orchards village in Glenfield, has put her hand up for a hightech cookies project – an exercise in which a team of residents will use a 3-D printer to make a cookie cutter then bake cookies to give to family or friends.”