HELEN Slattery swirls the wooden spoon around the edge of the bowl, scooping up the last of the mixture. She scrapes the spoon clean with a knife, dabs at the thick cake mixture to make sure it has settled into the corners of the square tin and spreads it evenly.
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Satisfied, she lifts the cake tin about 30 centimetres off the kitchen bench in her home in Nhill, in north-western Victoria. And quick as a flash she drops it on the bench with a thud.
She inspects it, spins it around and picks it up again. Not satisfied with her first cake drop, she puts her feet apart, flexes her knees, bends forward and drops the tin to the floor from a height of 40 centimetres.
It makes a smack that reverberates around the room. Mrs Slattery, whose cooking regularly wins prizes at the Royal Melbourne Show, is a picture of concentration as she bends down and picks up the tin, carefully eyeing her handiwork.
But she doesn't straighten her back and stand up, instead, she lets the cake drop with another loud smack, then repeats this twice more.
There's no recipe book open, but when you've won as many cooking prizes as Mrs Slattery, who is the catering committee convener of the Country Women's Association, recipe books aren't essential.
After the fifth drop she picks up the tin, but instead of heading for the oven she promptly drops the tin on to the bench with another loud smack. Satisfied that the cake has settled adequately, the air bubbles removed, she puts it in the oven, where it will cook for four hours at 100 degrees.
Unlike the other fruit cakes mixed and baked in this kitchen recently, this one is for home use only. It is the last fruit cake to go into the Slattery oven this year. She has already made one for the fire brigade, one for the local nursing home and others.
Each week, the 66 year old cooks a remarkable number of cakes, about 25 in a typical week, which are sold at the local Lowana community shop.
Mrs Slattery is a tireless community worker in her Wimmera home town.
She is the vice-president of the CWA's Nhill-Twilight branch. She is the president of the Nhill Hospital auxiliary and a member of the Nhill fire brigade auxiliary. She caters for the Nhill Cup on Boxing Day.
A member of the local Anglican Church, she's also on the parish council. She's the vice-president of the committee that runs the Lowana shop, which sells cakes, jams, biscuits, handcrafts and other things made by locals. Sometimes she serves customers in the shop.
On Christmas Day this year, like every year in Nhill for the past 20 odd years, she visited the Iona nursing home.
''We always have an entertainer come up and we have a little sing-song together, sing carols, we give out pressies. And generally just mark the occasion, instead of it just being like another day,'' she says.
Mrs Slattery started the annual Christmas visit and celebration at the nursing home back in the 1980s, when her father lived there. He died in 1989, but the ritual continues.
''You just do it, you just do it. Why not. What else would you do?'' she says, downplaying her vast well of generosity.
She acknowledges though that it's important to visit the sick and elderly in a community. ''Especially folk who might not have too many people, or people who live a long way away. It's just a thing to do, it's nothing glorious, or great or anything else, it's just good,'' she says.
Carol Clay, deputy state president of the CWA, says small towns like Nhill need people like Mrs Slattery.
''Everything she does is absolutely straight from the heart,'' Mrs Clay says. ''She's forever cooking for people and when anybody's sick, she's got the casserole made and she's there first.
''She does the flowers in the church, she teaches Sunday school - you name it, that woman does it.''
