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Rocco and I talk between ourselves for a second, not rushing into action at the same speed as our rivals. It’s a big work area, and the room is quite noisy now, so we can talk quietly without anyone else hearing us.
‘Obviously we should try and beat them,’ I tell him.
‘Obviously,’ he replies. Rocco takes the instructions and casts an eye over them. ‘All the ingredients are in front of us. What about, I tell you how much flour and butter we need, and you measure them out?’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ I reply.
I take the electric scales, and a bowl, and set things up.
‘First up, 225 grams of self-raising flour,’ Rocco instructs. ‘Do you say scone, as in gone, or scone, as in cone?’
‘I’m team “gone”,’ I tell him, although our host has been saying it the other way. ‘Although I’m the kind of pathetic where I’ll say it the other way if other people are, so I don’t embarrass myself.’
Rocco laughs.
‘I’m team “gone” too,’ he replies. ‘But I don’t really worry about what people think. You should try it, it’s liberating.’
‘My mum says I apologise too much,’ I reply. ‘She told me to try saying “thank you” instead – although I don’t think Leila would have appreciated me saying that after I dropped that ball on her foot.’
‘It rolled into her foot at best,’ he reminds me. ‘Next is fifty-five grams of butter.’
With the flour and the butter ready to go, we swap roles again. I read out the instructions while Rocco begins combining them.
‘What’s your go-to dish, if you’re cooking to impress?’ I ask him.
‘Pasta alla Deliveroo,’ he jokes. ‘Honestly, I’m hopeless. I know women find it really sexy, I do try.’
‘If you had to go onCome Dine with Me, and you obviously couldn’t get away with takeaways, what would you do?’ I ask through a smile.
‘I definitely don’t think I could pull off three dishes,’ he replies, as he rubs the flour and butter together with a confusing confidence. ‘I once tried to make my parents an anniversary dinner and I burnt the prawn cocktail.’
I snort.
‘How do you burn a prawn cocktail?’ I have to ask. ‘Even I know you don’t even cook them.’
‘I accidentally put the bowl with the prawns in on the hob,’ he confesses. ‘I hate to reinforce stereotypes, but I’m hopeless at multitasking.’
‘I can’t say anything, I once set a barbecue on fire,’ I confess.
‘Aren’t they supposed to be on fire?’ he replies.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘This was, somehow, an additional fire to the intentional one.’
‘I can make pizza,’ Rocco offers proudly. ‘Vague Italian heritage. Something lurking in my DNA must help with that. My mum says I make the best pizza she’s ever tasted, and if you can’t trust your mum, who can you trust?’
‘Are you close with your mum?’ I ask curiously. He makes it sound like he is, which is an excellent quality for a man to have.
‘Oh, my mum is the best,’ he replies. ‘I know it’s not necessarily cool, to love your mum, or whatever, but she’s great. We lost my gran last year, it hit us all pretty hard, but my mum did everything for her when she was alive and there’s clearly a real comfort in that. I try to do right by my mum, when I’m not serving her blackened prawns with a plastic reduction. Are you close with your mum?’
I smile. It might not be cool, but it’s endlessly charming.
‘I am,’ I reply. ‘She’s been cooking for me a lot recently, in my kitchen – it’s nice to see it being used by someone who knows what they’re doing. I’m getting quite used to it, actually. No one beats your mum’s cooking, do they?’
‘Erm, if I were you, I’d reserve judgement until I’d tasted these scones,’ he replies. ‘Have you seen this rubbing technique?’
‘Yes, you look like a man who has spent years practising his rubbing technique,’ I reply.
Rocco laughs. There’s something so attractive about the way he laughs. His face is so animated. He somehow finds a way to make everything he thinks and feels come across as so authentic. Although, let’s be real, there’s something so attractive about Rocco’s everything as far as I’m concerned. He’s ‘my type on paper’ as they say onLove Island, which I watched in lieu of a summer holiday this year.
