Outside work, I have a habit that started as a hobby and has become something closer to a second operating system: patisserie.

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I have attended Kirsten Tibballs' patisserie school - MasterChef regular, teacher, chocolatier, and widely known as the Queen of Chocolate - building skills in a world where precision matters and “near enough” rarely survives contact with tempered chocolate.

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It began with a genuine love of food, hosting, and dessert. Over time, it became a whole ecosystem. Recipes, methods, notes, techniques, ingredient lists, timing plans, failures, adjustments and ideas all needed somewhere to go. So, naturally, I started treating it like an operations problem.

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I use AI to download, sort, and categorise my growing library of patisserie notes and references, building what I jokingly call my ChefGPT: a personal cloud- kitchen knowledge base for finding recipes, comparing methods, planning menus, and making sure the thing that worked once can be found again when it matters.

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The result is a hobby with some fairly serious numbers behind it.

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Over the past two years, I have bought 50kg of chocolate, hosted a 22 person, 3 course Christmas in July, cooked 12 other three course dinner parties, and become (very happily) the default dessert bringer and birthday cake maker among family and friends.

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There is joy in all of it: the theatre of bringing out a cake, the quiet pressure of timing three courses, the ridiculous satisfaction of a clean cut through a layered dessert. But there is also something revealing in how I approach it.

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I like the preparation. I like understanding the method, then improving it. I like building systems that make ambitious things feel manageable.

I LOVE learning the science and chemistry behind the ingredients interacting. And of course, I like pouring my heart over something, for the people I love.