Draft:Terri Mercieca

Terri Mercieca is a Maltese-Italian Australian pastry chef, artisanal food producer and fine dessert consultant in London UK. She is the founder of Happy Endings Ice Cream, a business that specialises in luxury ice cream sandwiches and frozen desserts, both wholesale, and as pop-up restaurants in collaboration with other pastry luminaries under the name Sundae School.

Early Life
Mercieca was born in Newtown, Sydney Australia (April 7,1977), and raised in rural and suburban New South Wales. Both her Australian and Italian grandmothers were a formative influence on her championing nostalgic and comforting classic food.

Career
Mercieca’s early start as a chef came in Sydney where she worked her way up from via an apprenticeship to fine dining, eventually specialising as a pastry chef at Michelin starred Bennelong Restauarant at Sydney Opera House. She then moved to Melbourne, to work as Executive Pastry Chef and then as Head Chocolatier for Kennedy & Wilson Chocolates in the Yarra Valley. She won a George Alexander Foundation Fellowship at the International Specialised Skills Institute to bridge skill and knowledge gaps in the chocolate industry in Australia with a focus on artisanal chocolate production, travelling to work in Barcelona with chocolatier and pastry chef Oriol Balaguer. She went on to consult for Pure in Bangalore, India. She came to the UK in 2012 to take up a post as head of production at Damian Allsop, a fine dining chocolate house led by former El Celler de Can Roca pastry chef Damian Allsop. She went on to form her own dessert brand Fraise Sauvage in London, before opening Ice Cream brand Happy Endings there in 2014.

Recognition
In 2017 she won the YBF baking award (Young British Foodies Awards)  with her then business Fraise Sauvage, which retailed fine desserts to Harrods. She was named one of Code Hospitality’s 100 most influential women in Hospitality, 2021.

She has appeared on BBC’s Young Masterchef as a guest judge, and BBC good Food Podcast amongst other tv, radio and podcast appearances championing LGBTQIA+ and working-class led small business, and ethical ingredients and inclusion in food production.

In 2024 she published her debut cookbook, Happy Ending Cookbok: Desserts that Dreams are Made of, which focused on the science, versatility and nostalgia of ice cream. Her food writing and recipes have appeared in the Guardian, Waitrose, Ocado and Olive Magazine.