Behind those blue eyes and generous smile hides Maryvonne’s beating heart. A heart that she puts into baking the legendary homemade cakes that she has been supplying to the mountain leaders of Haut-Giffre for the past 10 years.
This wonderful local lady of 83 summers is not only kindly, she’s courageous too when it comes to walking up and down the valley’s footpaths in the company of hikers who are eager to try her gourmet treasures.
Maryvonne’s cakes are the icing on the hike!
When asked to talk about herself, Maryvonne begins with her working life. For more years than she can count, she was a maid, entirely devoted to the wellbeing of holidaymakers in Samoëns, at the Neige & Roc hotel run by the Deffaugt family who were like her own.
“My bosses were kind, I still phone the granddad every day,” she tells us.
And so we understand that beneath her fleece jumper, this generous lady’s heart is wide open.
Just as she used to put her heart into her work, she now puts it into the cakes she bakes to pop into the backpacks of her blue-eyed boys and girls, the Haut-Giffre guides who accompany hiking groups. Her gifts come as a pleasant surprise to hikers as they savour not only the splendour of the Haut-Giffre mountains, but also the taste of these homemade delights.
“They just have to give me a call and I make them a cake. It all started with Yannick and Pablo,” she says.
She does the same for lonely or sick neighbours and for children.
“Just leave your tin outside and I’ll know you want some cookies,” she says to Jules, her young neighbour, a 5-year-old gourmet. Magic!
Cakes worth their weight in gold…
Maryvonne, the good fairy who has been shining her light on mountain hikers in Haut-Giffre for 10 years, with her little sun-shaped sweet treats of which many have become so fond.
“People would come back just for my cakes, it really caught on!” she says.
Ever since, she has been making 2, sometimes 3 cakes every day. Her apple cake is a treasure that she offers carefully wrapped in tissue paper, gold-coloured of course. Each guide reminisces with their own favourite flavour – poppy-seed, chestnut, blueberry… As Maryvonne says, “I bring the cake, they take me hiking. And Maryvonne has to keep up!” declares this mountain lover who enjoys snowshoeing to La Bourgeoise in the Joux Plane sector or to the Loëx Plateau in winter, or hiking in the Fer-à-Cheval Cirque in summer. Except when she’s with her daughter, Marie-Hélène, in the mountains above Sixt-Fer-à-Cheval, trying to spot the bearded vulture (Gypaetus barbatus) leaving its nest. She declares an unconditional love for this mountain-dwelling bird of prey, “her Gypa” as she likes to call it. She also meets up with warden Frank Miramand from the Sixt-Fer-à-Cheval/Passy Nature Reserve, another of the blue-eyed boys who loves her cakes.
“Because giving a little happiness really does warm the cockles of my heart!” she concludes.
So perhaps this is the recipe for happiness?
Interview by Laure Béchade, journalist
Photo by Gérard Gachignard