Cover Girl

So I've finally made it. It's every girls dream to be a cover girl and my dream came through this week. Now, admittedly it's not Vogue Magazine as expected but much thanks to Country Living Magazine for featuring me in their current issue and popping me on the cover too. It's a fab mag, read and loved by thousands around the country so I'm more than happy with that!

The lovely Imen McDonnell from I Married an Irish Farmer did a great interview and feature with me. It's mainly about what I do with work and my love of all things food. In fact, the husband kept winding me up about my "everything about food makes me happy" quote. I simply asked him to think what his life would be like if my quote was "everything about food makes me unhappy". Hum. Shut him up.

Also, I have to thank fab photographer Jack Caffrey who took amazing shots as always. I work with Jack on Neven Maguire's food feature shots for the same mag so it made a bit of a change for Jack to get my mush in instead of the food I cook. Anyhow guys, thanks for making a great feature of me...it can't have been easy!

Oh, and it's not a case of who ate all the pies...I'm proudly showing my baby pie off here at about the six month mark.

Check out the recipe for those spiced banana muffins over on my Friendly Cottage blog.

Baking Made Easy

Happy New Year everyone! Hopefully you enjoyed fun & food filled festivities (but are not being too hard on yourself calorie counting now!).

Lorraine Pascale's new cookery show, 'Baking Made Easy' won't be any help to you if you are. The six part series kicked off tonight at 8.30pm on BBC2. It was fantastically filled with lots of deliciously tempting goodies including a savoury fig, mint and pistachio tart, soda bread, parmesan lollipops, blueberry mille feuille and an amazing 'I can't believe you made that cake'. Now, I can save you the calories if you like and tell you that having eaten everything, everything is definitely worth eating!!

I skipped off to London in early last summer for a few weeks to work on the show and ended up staying for five. And boy, was it a long hot summer. We had four ovens on the go with 30 degrees of heat blazing from the sun and of course couldn't open any doors or windows because of noise. Mega Melt. Mega melting chocolate. Mega melting pastry. Mega melting everyone and everything. Thankfully, that didn't show in Lorraine's cool performance!

Here are some behind the scenes snaps...

my very glamorous head quarters in the studio. I could come back from the kitchen to find my desk anywhere, including the garden at one point. on the only rainy day!

some continuity snaps of Lorraine's soda bread bites and the mille feuille pastries.

I can't believe you made that cake!