I’m so pleased to be able to share this piece with you today, it’s been sitting in my draft folder for longer than I’d like to admit but it’s finally ready! As always thank you so much for being here and for your support, it makes such a difference.
Rose Gregory is an Edinburgh-based pastry chef and baker. Since moving to Scotland’s capital city in 2011, she has worked at a number of establishments - from fine-dining restaurants to some of the city’s most respected bakeries. She is currently Head of Pastry at Company Bakery and also runs a popular side-business called Afternoon Tea by Rose - featuring a plethora of tiny cakes, dinky sandwiches and other tasty treats to snack on with no crust-less mass-produced bread in sight! Over the course of an hour, we covered everything from Rose’s current fascination with sweetcorn, her mental health journal to the trials and tribulations of pastry lamination.
Rose’s path into cheffing stemmed from art school. She told me, ‘I was really passionate about art and when I got into ECA I was over the moon because it was my first choice.’ She recalls stepping off the train at Waverley station and thinking that Edinburgh could quickly become her home. Reflecting, she said, ‘I think I was desperate for a change and a fresh start.
The thing that is often forgotten, is that you take your internal self with you, so all the things I was struggling with at home, I was still struggling with at university.’
It was a big move to make from Kent and Rose explained that she was eager to have independence and to be in a place that she really loved, doing something that she was really passionate and good at. Her mental health took a significant dip in her third year and she found that her anxiety and depression were making it impossible for her to focus on her very self-directed art course. As a result, she ended up having to do a second submission for her third year and consequently decided that she wouldn’t return for her fourth year.
She told me how she enjoyed the meticulous nature of painting, replicating things from real life onto paper or canvas and finding satisfaction in that but that it also ‘required such an intense focus and when you’re not feeling well in yourself the last thing you want to do is to sit with your own thoughts for 10 hours.’
When Rose chose to leave art school, she took several part time jobs in hospitality. One of her colleagues had a friend who was Head Chef at a restaurant and they offered Rose an opportunity to work for a couple of days each week, making some cakes for a cafe. Rose told me, ‘I can’t remember the time-frame but they offered me the job as pastry chef and I got to design the dessert menu and I really enjoyed that as a creative outlet.’ In this new field, Rose began to feel more like herself again. Although Rose enjoys all food - savoury as well as sweet - she found herself more drawn to the pastry and dessert side within a professional setting. Standing beside a hot grill, doing the meat and sauce wasn’t something that especially appealed to her.
She recalled, ‘What I liked about that first pastry job was that it was preparation based. I think that’s what I like, having a list of things to get done rather than being dictated by what’s coming in. That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed service when I’ve done it though.’
Four years ago, Rose started working for Company Bakery when they were purely making bread but were starting to think about making pastries. Rose only had a couple of months experience of laminating pastries at this stage but was desperate to be involved in the pastry side of things at Company. Around two years into her time there, she had a conversation with the Directors and they gave her the opportunity to start developing a recipe and start trying to build that side of the business. Rose explained that she did a lot of reading but learnt mostly from doing - practically trying it out for herself.
Rose told me, ‘I’ll be forever grateful that Company gave me the opportunity to make mistakes over that first six months of learning pastry - I learnt so much from them and I love what I do now.’
Fast-forward and Rose now heads up a team of five pastry chefs and the wholesale part of the business is booming. Although Rose enjoyed her time of bread, she finds a lot of satisfaction in making pastries - telling me that her favourite time of the week is on a Saturday morning where she spends time finishing the bakes off beautifully.
From here, I asked Rose how Afternoon Tea came about. She told me that it was a combination of several things falling into place. Back in 2020, Rose and her partner had planned a twelve month sabbatical to travel around South America. They’d left in January but due to a certain pandemic, they had to come back very early in March from Bolivia.
Luckily, Rose was able to get her job back at Company Bakery. In order to keep the team safe, they worked in two groups so Rose was working less days per week and found herself with more free time than she had pre-pandemic. She made a birthday afternoon tea for a friend, which went down a treat and she began thinking whether she could offer something for people to enjoy in their homes - taking inspiration from a lot of businesses at that time that had started doing takeaway and adapting their business models. She explained, ‘It was a different way of thinking about things, it didn’t require investment for bricks and mortar and all the things that come with that.’
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