LEMON AND RASPBERRY THUMBPRINT COOKIES

PROFILE

Ingredients

• 500 gm almond flour • ¼ tsp baking soda • Zest of ½ lemon, finely chopped • ½ tsp cinnamon • 2 tbsp honey • 1 tsp lemon juice • 1 tsp vanilla essence • 1 tbsp applesauce • 5 tbsp coconut oil, melted

• Homemade/ sugar- free raspberry jam

Method

Pre- heat the oven to 200° C.

Combine the almond flour, baking soda, lemon zest and cinnamon in a mixing bowl and mix.

Add the honey, lemon juice, vanilla essence and applesauce, and continue to mix on a low speed.

Add the coconut oil, little by little, until you form a dough.

Roll the dough into small balls and place on a baking tray lined with baking parchment.

Using your thumb, make a small indent in the middle.

Bake for 8 minutes or until the cookies turn golden brown.

Leave to cool on a rack for 15 minutes ( this is important, as they will be too soft otherwise) and then add a tsp of raspberry jam into the middle of each cookie. Serve.

BORN: April 4, 1960 ( age 56) Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria

DID YOU KNOW? Weaving fractured his hip doing a stunt for The Matrix, shifting the filming of the fight scenes to the end. Since Reeves got a neck injury at the same time, this suited him!

IN CHARACTER: 1 As the mysterious V in the dystopic thriller V for Vendetta 2 Weaving is well- known for his role as the iconic villain Agent Smith in The Matrix movies 3 Playing Captain America's nemesis in

4 Voicing Megatron in Transformers and all its sequels 5 Weaving plays several different roles in Cloud Atlas 6 A rare appearance as a human being in The Wolfman 7 As the elf lord Elrond in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies ( 1991), which was the first film I’d been involved with that I was really excited about doing. So that was a very important film, obviously for her, but also for me.

“Since Proof, there was another project of hers called Eucalyptus that nearly went into production, but the plug was pulled on it a couple of days beforehand for all sorts of personal and weird reasons.”

Weaving has also worked with director Peter Jackson on five films, counting three instalments of The Lord of the Rings ( 2001- 2003) and two of The Hobbit ( 2012 and 2014), all as the elf lord Elrond. However, the directors he has been most associated with are Lana and Lilly Wachowski, as the former Wachowski brothers are now known. He played the sinister Agent Smith in their breakthrough film The Matrix ( 1999) and its two sequels, as well as the title character in V for Vendetta ( 2005) and six roles in Cloud Atlas ( 2012).

“I thought that Agent Smith was quite amusing,” Weaving said. “When I met ( the Wachowskis), it was evident to me that they thought that he was quite amusing too. There was a great deal of enjoyment to be had in the playing of ( Smith). They agreed, and they liked that.

“I initially thought they were kind of geeky college kids who were really pleasant to be with,” he admitted. “But, honestly, they have really good brains. We got on really well. Our f amilies got to know each other. Working wit h t hem i s pl ayf ul , enjoyable, with a lot of laughs.”

Weaving was born in Nigeria, but also lived in England and South Africa before his family settled in Australia. That background has left him well suited to a collaborative process such as filmmaking.

“I spent my childhood travelling around the world, learning how to adapt and to fit into different situations,” he explained. “Every two years I’d move, so maybe I’m quite used to adapting myself to how other people think. Sometimes, with different directors, it takes a little longer to work out the way they express themselves. Did they mean what they said? Or is that code for something else?”

Another hallmark of his style is deep preparation. “I like pretty minimal conversation on the day ( of the shoot),” he said. “I like to do as much preparatory work as possible, talk with the director, get to know each other and then you can, as much as possible, work together on the day wordlessly.

“I suppose that’s the ideal,” the actor said. “I have worked with directors who are quite chatty, but I think, if their hearts are in the right place and their minds are really on the ball, and I really respect who they are and where they are coming from, I don’t care what they do.

“Respect and kindness — I think all of those things are really important above anything else.”

Weaving’s favourite place to work is, no surprise, Australia.

“We all have specific cultural things that make us different from each other,” he said. “There’s something about getting involved in particular stories in your own country which I find really cr i t i c al. I need t o celebrate t he particularities of where I live and the particular customs and the sense of humour of the people amongst whom I live. So there’s a political element, I suppose, to decisions that I make.”

His next two films also were shot in Australia. He co- stars opposite Toni Collette in Jasper Jones ( 2016), a