PHILIPPA Sibley loves watching people eat dessert. From inside every restaurant kitchen in which she has wielded a pastry brush, Sibley has spied on diners taking that first spoonful of her famed sweet sensations.
“The things people do are hilarious,” she says with a laugh. “From the eye close to the eye roll, some turn their spoon backwards, some point their spoon. Then there’s the air guitar face, it’s so funny. Like an orgasm face.”
It’s reactions like these that have led to Sibley being called Australia’s undisputed dessert queen. “I’d rather be the dessert princess,” she admits, raising a curved eyebrow. “Or enchantress. I like that.”
Ironically, she doesn’t like dessert. “I don’t eat sweets. I eat salt,” she says. The Snickers Bar dessert (or ‘‘Charlie Sheen’’ as she calls it since “it went crazy”), made famous on MasterChef and created during her time at Circa, was born of Sibley’s affection for salt. “I always loved Snickers and it’s because of the salted nuts,” she explains. “It gives you a mouth-watering tongue tingle.”
Sibley’s rise as Australia’s pastry chef sweetheart was born more from need than desire. “I didn’t mean to be a pastry chef,” she says. “I kind of got pigeonholed.” She honed her pastry skills at the three-Michelin star La Côte Saint Jacques in France before returning to Australia and opening her first restaurant, est est est, in 1997 with her now ex-husband Donovan Cooke.
Cooke’s technical aptitude for cooking meats and making sauces left Sibley in the pastry section and of course “I wanted to know everything and be good at everything”. The restaurant was awarded three hats and the gong for best new restaurant in The Age Good Food Guide. The duo went on to open two more restaurants, Luxe and Ondine, and they were jointly awarded The Age Good Food Guide chef of the year in 2004.
“It was all just hard work and partying,” Sibley recalls. “I didn’t take much notice of it all really.” She places a hand on her cookbook, PS Desserts, released in December last year. “This is my achievement,” she says. “This is my legacy, I suppose. This is what I’m known for. I’ve packaged everything up and it’s all in there.”
Sibley has given everything away: her dessert secrets and pastry techniques all wrapped up within the pages of an incredibly comprehensive dessert book. The favourite recipes are at the rear; Snow White and Rose Red, Peach Melba for Oprah and of course, the Snickers Bar.
“It’s taken me almost 20 years to build up my repertoire. There are a lot of things that took me such a long time to get right from years of stuffing up,” she says, and points to a chart of measurements. “Like this. I bled from the eyes in France for this. This is a diamond.”
Now Sibley is back in the kitchen as executive chef at Albert Street Food & Wine in Brunswick. She’s swapped the rolling pin for a cleaver and is taking back her chef’s hat. She’s come a long way from cooking alongside her mother in the family kitchen at 12.
“Dad used to joke that if there wasn’t anything in the cupboard to cook, I’d go and pull grass up from outside to cook with,” she says warmly. “I used to make such a mess. Still do,” she says, pointing to a blob of egg white that has attached itself like permanent plaster to her lounge room wall.
Messy, perhaps, but brilliant.
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