Sarah Rowden

Sarah Rowden, author and owner of St Helen’s Foodstore in St Helen’s Gardens, W10, takes multi-tasking and joie de vivre to a whole new level, says Emily Paine

Make, Bake and Celebrate, by Notting Hill residents Sarah Rowden and Joanna Vestey, is one of those children’s books so bursting with colour and life and fun that it makes you feel positive about absolutely everything.
When I caught up with chef Sarah (pictured above, right) in her cosy deli – St Helen’s Foodstore in W10 – it turns out that she is basically the book personified. She comes rushing up from the kitchen where, she explains, she’s been making canapés for 400 guests. She’s also just opened a new deli in Camden, and has two children under the age of three.

‘And we just moved house this weekend!’ she laughs. Most people would be suffering a nervous breakdown at this point – Sarah, however, looks positively cheerful. Feeling slightly dazed by the mere prospect of how much juggling her life must involve, I ask her how she manages it. ‘Well, I have a great support network so I’m lucky in that. The things that I do I really love – sometimes I have trouble squeezing everything into the day, but I never get to the point where I just think “I wish I’d never done this,” because I love all of it.’

The basic idea behind Make, Bake and Celebrate is to provide a springboard of activities for the whole family. ‘Rather than saying this is what you do, while I do my thing, it’s incorporating a lot of things together. We’re both really busy, but love spending time with our families. So that was when we thought – this is a great idea for taking the sting out of those difficult days when you’re tired but you desperately want to have fun.’ 

Sarah and Jo have already got several other books in the pipeline. ‘We have five annuals planned. Field to Fork is one – about food and production. Polly, my daughter, has just got to the stage where she can work out that pork is a pig and flour is bread, but wheat and flour hasn’t quite made the leap yet, so we’re trying to introduce that.’

Many of the ideas in the book developed from things Sarah and Jo remembered doing as they grew up. I wonder how Sarah feels childhood today is different to her own. ‘Well, it’s not quite as relaxed being a child now – it’s just achieve, achieve, achieve a bit more, so it’s nice to be able to go – it doesn’t matter. If it doesn’t look like what it started off as – turn it into something else!’

So have their children enjoyed researching the book as much as their mums obviously have? ‘Oh yes, they were totally into everything. It’s funny though – you never know which things they’re going to like. The heart cookies that I thought Polly would go crazy for – absolutely no way. The pinker the icing, the happier it was making (Jo’s son) Jago. And that turned out to be because he knew his Mummy liked pink, so he was finding the perfect pink for her. Though I’m sure by the time my children are 10 years old, they’ll be going ‘Please don’t make me make anything else. I don’t want to do any baking or gluing, just leave me alone!’ Maybe, but for the time being at least, there looks set to be hours of fun in store, both for Sarah’s kids and for all her readers.