Woolworths TASTE

Bake boss

ONE OF THE GREATEST THINGS ABOUT FOOD, perhaps, is that it resonates with us all, in one way or another. And when the cooking bug bites, there’s very little you can do to ignore it. Zorah Booley-Samaai, the brain behind food blog In The Midnight Kitchen, is living testament to this. “My mom is a lawyer and my dad is a professor of law,” she says. “So my path was kind of laid out for me. It wasn’t the norm to pursue a career in a creative field.” Zorah chose to study law but as her degree progressed, she began to realise that her heart wasn’t in it. “I felt no passion for it; it wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

Switching lanes was no easy task and Zorah had to have the tough conversation with her mother, Zorina. “I told her that I wanted to pursue cooking and baking,” she says. “She was a bit thrown at first, but very supportive overall.” Zorah told her family that she had her eye on a culinary school in South Africa, but her mother insisted that if she was going to do this, she was going to do it properly. So she applied to the Le Cordon Bleu culinary arts institute in London, and off she went.

“Ironically, I wasn’t the type of

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