Food
At Home With Emelia Jackson
Marketing wiz. MasterChef alumna. Business guru. Mother. Emelia Jackson shares her journey in life, love and food with Selector.
It's a bright, late-spring morning in Emelia Jackson's inner-city Melbourne backyard, her smiling face appearing on-screen framed by characteristically stylish eyewear, the evident light chill in the air kept at bay by a dark knit sweater. "I've got lots of things happening inside, so I thought let's get in the sunshine and enjoy it."
Her home is but a few suburbs away from where she grew up in Templestowe, the product of a close-knit family that were outliers even in the cultural melting pot of the Victorian capital. "It's kind of funny because my dad's Australian, my mum's mum was Macedonian but born in Greece, so she considered herself both Greek and Macedonian, and then my mum's dad was Serbian," she relates.
Emelia & her mother, Nada.
"They're all very geographically close, yet they're all very different. So my mum never really felt like she fit in with any one ethnic group, really - she never felt Macedonian, she never felt Greek, she never felt all the way Serbian." While Jackson's grandmother, or baba, was never a part of the local Macedonian club, what she did have in common with that dynamic little pocket of Europe was an innate sense of hospitality - and a desire to show love through food.
"I never went to my baba's house without there already being food on the table, anticipating our arrival. I suppose to Europeans in general feeding is an extension of love," she observes. Clearly, it's an attitude of generosity that continues to shape Jackson today. "How I look at food, and how I love to feed - I love to feed more than I love to cook."
Jackson prepares Maznik, a traditional Macedonian pastry.
And cook she has. Overcoming a traumatic injury as a teenager sharpened her focus on her aspirations. In deference to her parent's wishes, she completed a degree in psychology, management and marketing, but it was cooking that was her calling. "I'd always wanted to be a chef. My parents were like, "that's great - we want you to be a chef. As soon as you get a degree, you can become a chef.'"
ANSWERING THE CALL OF MASTERCHEF
Emelia's delicious Tulumba.
Jackson had landed a role in tourism marketing, but took the opportunity to see the world a little. Come 2014, she had spent six months travelling Europe and the US, absorbing international hospitality and produce markets, before opportunity knocked shortly after her return to the office in Australia.
"I was always the person bringing cakes and share lunches and feeding the office," she recalls of her time in tourism marketing. "And someone in the office said, 'oh, did you see MasterChef applications are open? You should apply.' And I did, and it sort of snowballed from there."
Jackson won over the crowd and impressed the judges enough to secure third place in the 2014 season of the show. George Calombaris was so taken by her talents he extended the invitation for her to become part of the-then red hot Press Club brigade. It was to be short-lived. "I did love working at the Press Club," Jackson says, "but I don't think I was in the right headspace for it at the time."
London called, and a productive couple of years was spent establishing a cake business. "I definitely needed to clear my head off the back of MasterChef. Everyone asks you, like, 'have you opened a restaurant?' and you're just there going "I don't even know what tomorrow looks like, I'm not opening a restaurant!'"
On her return to Australia, Jackson continued her focus on her home-based business, establishing an enviable reputation and following for her wedding cakes and desserts. "It grew from a side gig while I was figuring out what to do next to a very, very flat out, thriving business."
All of which informed her decision to once more step into the shining spotlight of MasterChef in 2020, for its 'Back to Win' season. "I'd kind of reached the ceiling of a home-based business. It was, do I open a store? What does that look like? What does that mean?"
Being 2020, Covid hit during filming.Before it struck, Jackson would bake all weekend for her business, then film all week. Suddenly, the wedding industry that fuelled so much demand evaporated. True to the theme of the show's season, however, our protagonist won, and again a new world opened up before her.
STORY TIME WITH EMELIA JACKSON
Traditional Macedonian Maznik pastry.
Jackson started on her first book, First, Cream the Butter and Sugar, in late 2020. She and her partner Craig had their first child, a girl, in 2021, during the drafting of the manuscript. The end result is a gorgeous kitchen companion, the kind of title that one can comfortably see being handed on from parent to child, not a mere collection of recipes but a beautifully presented baking apprenticeship in book form.
Another child, this time a boy, arrived during production of her follow-up, Some of My Best Friends are Cookies, published late 2024, and another - book, that is - is on the way. Jackson's life seems to have settled into a dynamic balance of domestic bliss and creative abundance. With her manuscript finished, she's running baking classes again - "which I absolutely adore" - and tending to both her family and her growing business.
"Well, I've finally implemented some division in my life... Mondays and Fridays are just with my kids, where I don't stress about achieving anything other than being a great mum, and Tuesday to Thursdays are my workdays now," she says. It's a hard-won balance, but worth it.
"I've got a one-year-old and a three-year-old and sometimes I just catch little moments of... you know, this is a hard stage of life I'm in, but what a beautiful stage of life I'm in as well," Jackson reflects.
"I love cooking with my kids. I absolutely love it. It took me a minute to loosen my reins of control and really enjoy it, but now it's one of my most treasured things." Baba would be proud.