At five, I was peeling off recipes from Nestlé Ideal milk tins and pasting them into a scrap book, and at seven, my parents finally let me into the kitchen to experiment. By the time I was a teenager, I was hosting dinner parties for friends at my house, dishing out aromatic chicken rice and piping hot laksa.

Still, I followed the conventional route into the working world, studying engineering and practicing as a mechanical engineer for over 15 years before moving to conference management. In the late 1990s, the dot-com boom beckoned and, together with some friends, I became a technopreneur in a start-up venture. When that bubble burst in 2001, I was, for the first time in my life, left with no direction on what to do next. I considered several options but kept coming back to the one consistent passion in my life – cooking. And so Cookery Magic was born.

Cooking has allowed me to express myself in so many ways, and to experience so many cultures through the hundreds of amazing people I have met in my classes. I have especially savoured the ability to travel and experience amazing cuisines around the world. In 2006, I studied cake-decorating at the renowned Wilton School in Chicago and returned home to branch into yet another area of creative culinary arts, creating fanciful birthday and wedding cakes.

I am blessed to be able to say today, in the words of Ray Bradbury, that I am doing the things that I love, and the things that I love are the things that I am doing. 

So I welcome you into my humble home where I hope to impart both my knowledge and love of cooking to you. I look forward to meeting you.