A Half Baked Idea How Grief, Love and Cake Took Me From the Courtroom to Le Cordon Bleu

by Potts, Olivia

• ISBN13: 9780241380468
• ISBN10: 0241380464
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2020-11-01
• Publisher: Penguin

Summary

At the moment her mother died, Olivia Potts was baking a cake. She was trying to impress the man who would later become her husband. Meanwhile, 275 miles away, her mother was dying. In the grief-stricken months that followed, Olivia came home from her job as a criminal barrister miserable and tired, and baked soda bread, pizza, and chocolate banana cake. Even when it went badly (which was often), cooking brought her comfort. So she concocted a plan: she would begin a newer, happier life, filled with fewer magistrates and more macarons. She left the bar for Le Cordon Bleu, plunging headfirst into the eccentric world of patisserie. Interspersed with recipes ranging from passionfruit pavlova to her mother's shepherd's pie, this is a heart-breaking, hilarious, life-affirming memoir about dealing with grief, falling in love and learning how to bake a really, really good cake.

Author Biography

Olivia Potts is an award-winning food writer and chef. She read English at the University of Cambridge and practised as a criminal barrister for five years before deciding to leave the bar for a career in food. In 2017, she graduated from Le Cordon Bleu and was awarded the Young British Foodies Fresh Voices in Food Writing Award. She was recently shortlisted for the Fortnum and Masons Cookery Writer of the Year Prze 2019. Now Olivia is the cookery columnist for the Spectator, and also writes for the New Statesman, the Guardian and the Telegraph, among others. A Half Baked Idea is her first book.