Urban World

The Smile - Lorraine Pascale

I've always loved Lorraine Pascale's smile, who wouldn't? Like Kate Moss, she looks utterly unique.

Spotted by a Storm Models scout aged 16, she was an instant success and became the first black British model to land the cover of American Elle. Lorraine walked runways and shot major commercial campaigns for Versace and Donna Karan, for Benetton and Gap. 

After becoming bored of modelling, she tried various careers but always seemed to give up halfway through until she enrolled on a full-time diploma in food and wine in 2005 at Leith's - the renowned cookery school. Halfway through day one of Leith's demanding course, she realised that she had found her calling. "I fell in love with it”. “I thought I had arrived” she said.

After graduating from Leith's and working in various restaurants including the Mandarin Oriental, the 18-hour days while caring for her daughter Ella, became unrealistic. After a year of intense slog in London's challenging kitchens, she answered an advert on website gumtree.com, got a job at London cake destination the Hummingbird Bakery, and eight months into that she decided to start her own cake business. "Gluten-free at first because “every woman thinks they've got a problem with wheat." She says, "Only of course - we haven't."

Lorraine is an intelligent women, so she abandoned the gluten-free idea and focused instead on home baking which started with birthday cakes to the parents of her daughters school friends. Marco Pierre White - who she knew from her modelling career - suggested that she speak to Selfridges' food director Ewan Venters and in 2008, Venters commissioned her to work on a range of celebration cakes. That’s when her business really took shape. Doing the Christmas cakes was her big break and she ended up making two hundred and fifty of them.

"Seeing them on the shelves was an amazing feeling.” She said.

I bet. Going from modelling to baking is definitely a big career leap but I think we've all been there. You know what I mean, that feeling when you just need to follow your heart and let passion and fate direct you.

The former model still works 18 hour days developing her business but plans on expanding so there's an Ella's Bakehouse shop in every part of the country.