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

by Olivia Potts

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780241380468
Publisher:	Penguin Random House UK
Publication date:	11/01/2020
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	775,503
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.75(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

I cannot express how much I adored this book. It made me laugh, cry, salivate and, on no less than four occasions, resolve to learn patisserie and leave the criminal Bar. Olivia Potts has delivered a tender and beautifully written tour-de-force on the four tenets of the human experience; love, grief, hope and cake. If this is not the book of the summer, I will eat my wig. An absolute triumph - - The Secret Barrister

An utterly beautiful, moving, bittersweet book on love and loss. I loved it - - Dolly Alderton

A heart-wrenching yet humorous portrayal of grief, a delicious collection of recipes, an inspirational tale of changing careers, and a feel good love story - - Vogue

An honest, brave and funny account of what it is to love, to lose love and how to make macarons - - Red

I loved it so much. It's funny, sharp, sad and full of clear observations about food. I laughed so much (and I cried) - - Ella Risbridger, author of Midnight Chicken

A brilliant, brave and beautiful book: funny and charming; utterly inspiring and life-affirming. I loved it - - Olivia Sudjic

An open-hearted, uproariously funny, moving love story. It will make you laugh and cry in equal measure, and fall in love with baking, with eating, and with love itself. A remarkable book by an enormously talented writer - - Kate Young, author of The Little Library Cookbook

Her writing inspires resilience - - Woman & Home

From the Publisher