At Home with Nicole De Marco

Food, family and Italian hospitality

 

At Home With is an original series from Honest Toil exploring the people using our olive oil in their own homes. Through conversations, recipes and personal stories, the series offers a glimpse into the spaces, traditions and rituals that shape the way we cook at home – celebrating thoughtful ingredients, shared tables and the role our olive oil plays in everyday kitchens.

For Nicole De Marco, food has always been tied closely to memory, care and connection. Raised in Italy after moving there from Argentina as a toddler, cooking was never treated as something separate from daily life. It was how love was expressed, traditions were carried forward and time was shared together around the table.

Now working as a fashion designer and product developer, Nicole still approaches cooking with that same sense of creativity and emotion. 

“Cooking feels like giving someone a hug from the inside.”

Some of her earliest memories take place in her aunt’s kitchen. Living near Nicole’s nursery, her aunt would collect her each afternoon and bring her back to the family pizzeria she owned. There, Nicole would sit on the counter eating thick slices of sourdough spread with Nutella while trays of fragrant orange cakes baked in the oven for friends and family. “Her cakes were famous in our town,” Nicole recalls. “But what stayed with me most was the way she baked – with generosity, patience and love.”

Watching simple ingredients become something capable of bringing people together left a lasting impression. Years later, baking still carries that same meaning for her: an act of care, generosity and peace. At home, cooking has only become more important over time. Nicole speaks about food with both creativity and warmth – fascinated by flavour pairings and ingredients, but equally by the feeling a meal creates for the people sitting around the table.

“My Italian upbringing shaped my relationship with food profoundly,” she explains. “In Italy, food is never just nourishment – it’s conversation, celebration, hospitality and family.” That philosophy runs through the dish she prepared for At Home with: an olive oil-infused tiramisu made in two versions. In both, Honest Toil is folded gently through the mascarpone cream, becoming part of the texture itself and adding richness and softness to the dessert. Savoiardi biscuits are soaked in freshly brewed espresso before being layered with mascarpone and dark cocoa powder. For the second version, Nicole adds a final drizzle of olive oil between each cocoa-dusted layer – a small addition that deepens the flavour and gives the tiramisu an almost silky finish. 

Tiramisu is the dessert she returns to most often for friends and family. “It’s my signature dessert,” she says. “The one that always seems to bring everyone together at the end of a meal.” Her favourite moment comes just after serving, when someone inevitably takes a bite and jokes that they could eat the entire tray themselves – followed by everyone else around the table agreeing.

For Nicole, those moments are exactly what cooking is about: creating comfort, connection and memories that linger long after the plates have been cleared. And usually, somewhere nearby, Miso the dog is hoping for leftovers.