Pastry chef chats tasty tarts and sweet-toothed princes
Ravneet Gill reveals her baking highs
If you’re a cookie fiend, you are fully advised to follow chef and cookbook author Ravneet Gill on Instagram – she is the master of perfectly crisp, perfectly gooey, and incredibly chocolatey cookies.
She is also a food columnist and the latest judge on Junior Bake Off. To celebrate her debut cookbook earlier this year – The Pastry Chef’s Guide – we quizzed her on her food memories…
Her earliest food memory is…
“I think it was eating a packet of chocolate raisins, because I lived above a cornershop when I was a kid. I have very distinct memories of running in and grabbing a packet of chocolate raisins off the shelf, and eating it.
I got a hole in my milk teeth because I ate so many sweets.”
Gill’s culinary high has to be…
“I made a cake for Prince Charles, but I didn’t know it was for him until he turned up, which was great. It was like a Victoria sponge cake, a really tall one. He was like,‘i love it, I’m so glad you used real butter’.that was a nice highlight, even though I’m not really a royalist, but it was pretty fun.
“I cooked in the presence of Beyoncé once. I watched her the whole time. I was working in an open kitchen, and no one else cared, and she was just there. I was like, ‘I’m actually just going to stand here and look at her’. She was with Jay-z, and then, when she’d finished eating, they took her out the back exit, so I went and stood up against the fridge so she would brush past me.
It was really funny, the album before Lemonade (title Beyoncé) – I used to listen to that album every day before work, it was my album, so when she came in, it was like, mind blowing.”
Biggest food-related disaster was…
“I’ve had so many. I have them all them time.all the women in my gym (in
non-covid times), they always pester me for desserts, every time I go into a gym class it’s like, ‘Rav, where’s the cake?’ Because sometimes I’ll bring cake, but sometimes I won’t – I think it’s all they want me for.
“I’d taught a cookery class, everyone had left a little bit of frangipane in their bowls, so I scooped it all into a bowl and mixed it altogether and baked off a few tarts – these beautiful cherry tarts. So the next day, I walked in all smug with these tarts, handed them out, and then that evening I got a text saying,‘thanks for the tart, but was it meant to be really salty?’.
“What happened was, in that class, someone had made their frangipane with salt, not sugar, and I’d given out those tarts. I couldn’t sleep; I had to make a whole new batch of tarts to make myself feel better.”
The moment she remembers first being proud of herself for cooking for people…
“When I was kid, I was obsessed with making penne arrabiata, it was my favourite dish. But I’d make it and it was quite disgusting, and I used to insist that my family would eat it.”