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“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.

Ten years ago, Al-Buhisi carried a small dream that grew within her: to have her own space in the world of desserts.

“When I was a child, I loved making sweets — especially cakes,” she told me. “I thought it was a normal hobby every girl might have, but with time I realized my passion wasn’t ordinary at all.”

In February 2022, Al-Buhisi launched her online cake business while studying accounting at Al-Azhar University. She ran the entire operation from a small private room in her family’s home in Deir al-Balah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, turning it into a workshop of creativity and determination. Her family believed in her completely; they bought her the tools she needed, and even a refrigerator to start her work. Al-Buhisi says that moment was one of the happiest in her life — it felt like she was finally stepping onto the path she loved.

Her name began to........

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