Jillian McInnes has passion for pastry

Perth-born Jillian McInnes reveals how she decided that the sweet life was for her — and how she reinvented the Jaffa Cake.

Jillian McInnes.

By Helen Brown
Published in the Courier : 10.08.10
Published online : 14.08.10 @ 11.01am

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At 24, Jillian McInnes has already cooked her way into a top-class Michelin-starred kitchen. She's worked in places such as Perthshire's Huntingtower Hotel, Harvey Nichols' Forth Floor eatery in Edinburgh, in two of Melbourne's most diverse and popular restaurants and is currently part of a small and highly-creative team in Leith's The Plumed Horse with chef/patron Tony Borthwick.

"It's my first Michelin-starred job and a great opportunity to take what I do to the next level.

"When I came home from Australia, I contacted a few places on spec and was offered the job here, which is just great.

"It's fine dining, more refined and detailed than what I had done before, aiming at really high quality and standards. It has to be up to scratch — people are looking for that and it's a real challenge to meet their expectations.

"There are four of us in the kitchen including Tony and fortunately, we all get on well. We work closely together and Tony's very open to ideas and opinions, he likes people to progress and develop in their own way while he oversees that.

"It gives you a great chance to try out new things under the eye of someone who can really help you put your ideas together."

Signature dish

That's where the innovative Jaffa Cake dessert came in and it's rapidly becoming what chefs refer to as a 'signature dish'.

"It goes down well, which is nice," Jillian said.

"It's like a lot of things, something just sparks off an idea and you try out a lot of versions before you get to the right result. I just ate one one day and thought, 'I can do something with this' and I started experimenting.

"I think it's a really good example of what I like doing, which is something classic with a twist. It became a kind of layered cake with sponge and orange jelly, chocolate orange ganache — a rich chocolate and cream mixture — and chocolate mousse with the addition of orange sherbet to give it a bit of bite.

"It does taste like a Jaffa cake — it's one of my favourites, too!"

Jillian's love of food started young when, she says, "I used to try to make cakes. It didn't always work but in my imagination it did and I loved trying.

Pastry

"When I left Perth Grammar School when I was 16, I went to Elmwood College in Cupar and studied both cooking and pastry work for two years before I decided that I really loved working on the pastry skills and ingredients.

"I was working part-time at the Huntingtower Hotel near where I lived, helping in all the different areas in the kitchen but it was a pastry chef that I really wanted to be."

Having honed her skills, she was taken on at the fashionable Harvey Nichols in-store restaurant in Edinburgh, part of a much bigger team and one of four in the pastry section.

"I learned so much from the other chefs — again, it was a very open kitchen with lots of encouragement. I've been very lucky, I think — you don't always get that — and it's great to pick up ideas and skills and then run with it a bit yourself.

"I started as a commis chef at the age of 18 and was there four years until I ended up as a senior chef de parti and moved up to become second in the kitchen."

At that point, itchy feet exerted themselves and Jillian and her partner, also a chef, decided that the time had come to go travelling.

Thinking big — and far — they settled on Australia, not just because of its own fascinations but because of the wonderfully eclectic food culture.