Perth-born Jillian McInnes reveals how she decided that the sweet life was for her and how she reinvented the Jaffa Cake.
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 dishThat’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.
As well as exploring and seeing the sights, Jillian also worked full-time in two renowned kitchens in the city of Melbourne, highly regarded for its range and stylish approach to restaurant food.
Jillian explained, “They don’t have the Michelin star system in Australia they have ‘chef’s hat’ awards and the more hats a place gets, the better it is.
“There’s a great eating-out lifestyle there people eat out every night, after work or before they go out on the town, whereas here it’s still more a weekend or special occasion thing. I worked in a two-hat Italian fine dining place called Donovan’s, right on the water beside the area known as St Kilda and it was a really fast-paced operation, up to 150 covers every day.
“I worked with another pastry chef there and we got to make a lot of Bombe Alaska, a version of classic Baked Alaska.
“It’s a really popular dish there and takes a lot of work, especially using piping skills. Learning to do that in a really fast-paced atmosphere was a challenge.
“There are similarities to some aspects of British-style eating but it does tend to be a bit lighter. There’s also more of an old-school feel here, you can often do more of your own thing whereas over there, what the head chef says, definitely goes!
“It taught me a lot and I’m thinking about making mini-versions of Bombe Alaska here I think it would go down well with customers.”
Jillian’s Australian adventure also saw her working in a well-known seafood restaurant, Bacash, where she extended her skills by learning all about fish, from shucking oysters to sourcing produce.
“Everything had to be just perfect, very fresh and of course, the fish tended to be very different from the ones we eat here people appreciate fish more there, I think, and it made me do that too.
“It was a place where everything on the plate was very simple, with clean lines, no fuss. It was a really good discipline, you had to think about what you were putting out and why. There was a lot of thinking about position and precision.”
She also managed to find many good places simply to enjoy eating.
“People are so interested in food and so many restaurants had a good atmosphere. The markets were great too the fish market, meat market, bread market. It was definitely an education.”
Coming back to Edinburgh was a big step but one she really wanted to make.
“There are so many different restaurants there, different styles of food in every one. The Kitchen, for example, is old school, very classic, Martin Wishart has the French influence and 212 is just right out there. I like to move around and try everything. It’s good to keep up.”
New and imaginative ideas come up all the time and she admits to keeping a notebook just to keep track of them all.
“There wasn’t quite the same opportunity to experiment in Australia so I brought back a notebook full of things that I wanted to try when I got back home.”
As to her own tastes in puddings and sweets, she has gone, she says firmly, from being a chocoholic to appreciating fruitier, fresher flavours.
“I love anything with rhubarb, passionfruit, pineapple exotic fruits like that. I think Australia did that for me but it’s great to have those tastes and textures after a meal of several courses. I love that.”