Seventy years after she won her first cooking prize, the cake champ is sharing her skills and wisdom with our readers.

She has aspiring chefs everywhere sifting sugar in a desperate effort to replicate her peach blossom cake, and instant MasterChef star Merle Parrish couldn’t be prouder. Welcoming Woman’s Day into her weatherboard cottage, tucked away on a quiet street in the central NSW town of Cudal – we’re the only car for kilometres too – the 78-year-old cake champ has a spring in her step as she shows us into the tiny kitchen where the magic happens.

No wonder she’s smiling. Merle, who has been baking for 70 years, is our newest small-screen sensation after her star turn on MasterChef, where her concoction of delicate sponge and glossy icing took the cake in a cook-off against contestant Billy Law. “I started cooking for our little local show when I was seven,” she explains. “I had to make Anzac biscuits, and as far as I can remember, I won it.” This tiny trophy, won way back in 1941, whetted Merle’s appetite for a life as a cuisine champion.

“I just love cooking, but I also love the competitive side of it because I do a lot of competitive cooking,” she says. “But I don’t win everything, apart from the peach blossom cake competitions!” Merle inherited her love of cooking from her mum, who handmade the wedding cake when Merle married her late husband Clyde in 1954. Raising their three children – “who would come home from school every day clamouring for whatever I had in the tin for them” – to appreciate classic cakes has today turned them into her toughest competition.

“When the children were teenagers they used to bake against me,” she remembers. “One time, my youngest son Robert, who’s 53, made a batch of scones and he had scones left over after he entered the junior section, so he put them in the senior section. He got first place and I got second.” Merle’s daughter Marianne, now 54, is still a keen cook, and her eldest son David, 56, plans to publish his own cookbook later this year.

Get Merle's top baking tips plus her Peach blossom cake recipe in this week's Woman's Day on sale July 4, 2011.