“The hardest part of working during the war was the endless search for the ingredients I needed to make cakes,” 23-year-old Gaza baker Dema Al-Buhisi tells me.

“For months, that struggle consumed me,” she adds. “Finding flour alone took five full days — five days just to get clean, unspoiled flour that hadn’t gone bad. And what about the famine we lived through? There was no meat, no vegetables, no fruit, not even medicine … so how could I possibly find anything related to baking cakes in the middle of all that scarcity?”

And yet with a resourcefulness and tenacity that moved everyone around her, Al-Buhisi found ways to continue baking throughout the worst days of the shelling and starvation inflicted by the Israeli military.

For this, she has become known in Gaza as the “Cake Girl”: she is an embodiment of how so many of us in Gaza have risked death to watch our dreams breathe.

Al-Buhisi has inspired many of us with her creativity and innovation. During the harshest days of famine, I was drawn to photos of her cakes on Instagram — they were colorful and inviting, even though we had no access to eggs or traditional food coloring!

I asked her the secret behind her creativity, and she told me it came from the alternatives she invented herself: She used vinegar instead of eggs, and replaced fruit and coloring with turmeric to give her cakes a beautiful yellow hue.

“When I Work, I Feel Like I Can Breathe Again”