Oh, interesting

... too, too heavy and too rich.

But I thought, "Yeah, that's the quintessential chocolate cake." And recently, um, what I, I, when my children were little and I would make them, you know, cakes for their birthdays, they then, you know, they, they wouldn't be discerning.

They're just, you know, I, it's really all for me to sort of decorate, and they were only interested in the icing and the decoration.

Hmm.

And finally, after we wrapped up Comfort and I had some time, I thought, actually, what I really wanted to get back to was the recipes that I really loved.

Because I think when you're a product developer for, uh, an organization like Ottolenghi, you're so focused on creativity, originality.

And having a break from that, I returned to the recipes that I knew and loved.

And then you go on to answer this in the book, but actually, I would love for our listeners to hear it from you now, because I found that very powerful.

I mean, it's quite a grandiose title, you know, Faking and the Meaning of Life.

You know, like, who knows what the meaning of life is? First of all, the title actually comes from a book by a psychoanalyst, a New York psychoanalyst called Irvin Yalom.

And his book was called Mama and the Meaning of Life.

And when I was training as a psychologist, I was very captured by all his writing, but particularly this one.

What I took away from the book was this idea that all the ordinary moments in life stitched together makes for a meaningful life.

And that's always stuck with me.

So I just want to ask, you're practicing all through the time that you were working in the test kitchen at Otolenghi and developing recipes?

Why was this the right time to write a book that combined your, your interest in psychology and your love of baking?

You know, I didn't plan it like that.

After, you know, collaborating on several books with Yotam Ottolenghi, um, and that was a very fertile and creative time, and I absolutely loved it.

You know, Ottolenghi is so much about bold flavors and looking externally and excitement, and I suddenly felt this pull to look more inward and more internally for comfort and small, you know, j- everyday joys.

And it occurred to me that through- throughout my whole life and career, I've always baked, you know, small things in small gestures.

Of course, at Ottolenghi, we have to sort of impress because it's a restaurant and it's a cafe.

We need to get people in.

How did you decide which recipes would go in which sections? [chuckles]