“Both my grannies were phenomenal cooks. Nan Logue, dad’s mum taught cooking at Muswellbrook High,” she says.

The leap from a position as a foot soldier in the army of cooks driving Sydney’s food revolution to officer status ... how did it happen?

Well it began not with a pie but with a cake. “I baked a cake in my dodgy little flat in Neutral Bay, walked it up the hill and sold it to a local deli.”

By rights that cake should have been a victoria sponge, that staple of country cooks, but it was a trendy urban hummingbird job, that sinful combination of sponge layers, pineapple, banana, pecans and cream cheese frosting, evolved in the American South via roots in Jamaica. As La Campbell would have said, bloody delicious.

And so are the glorious classic Italian dishes set before us at lunch. We are at Icebergs, one of the two idiosyncratic, quintessentially Aussie eateries that bookend the most famous beach in the world. What a day! Bondi is alive with light, refracted from a sparkling ocean. The sky is that intense southern cerulean blue one sees in a Streeton landscape.

There are people on the beach. In the water. This is winter? Heads turn when Logue arrives, tall, slim, beautiful, looking gorgeous in snappy white pants, a gelato pink sweater pepped up by a rose-printed scarf. Her blonde hair is brushed to an incandescent shine. A single perfect pale pink pearl on a platinum chain as fine as fuse wire is her only jewellery.

I admire it and she tells me it’s a gift from “someone special”.

Hard to believe that this slender streak of style has just come from overseeing the filling for a batch of her legendary chicken and leek pies, of which she produces several thousands per week .

This lunch represents an indulgent break in an ironclad routine.

“I am on the mat at 7am,” she tells me, alluding to the yoga class with which she begins most weekdays. Fitness would seem something of a fetish. Weekday yoga is part of her regime, but so is diet.

“I can’t tell you how much better I feel when I think beforehand about what I’m putting down my cake hole.” Last night she cooked for that aforementioned but unidentified someone special. “We just had a perfect little quiche lorraine and a green salad with pear, walnut and parmesan.”

“For dessert. I put an apple crumble in the oven and fed that to him, I didn’t have any. I poured two glasses of pinot but I just sniffed mine and I felt so much better on the yoga mat this morning.”

After her routine of ujjavi breathing exercises, savasana, lunges and downward dog pose and a glass of juice and bowl of yoghurt, it’s off to her Marrickville kitchen to oversee a vast staff and drive an enterprise that began in the mid-90s as a humble pie shop in Darling St, Balmain.

“It was there for 15 years and it really put me on the map.”

That map subsequently extended eastwards with the opening of her eponymous Double Bay store. She is passionate about the Cross St shop (as she is about retail in general).

“That store is now 17 years old and iconic in the Bay.”

For much of the three decades of growth from those early days in Neutral Bay there was a further force behind the Logue brand — that larger than life showbiz personality, the late Harry M Miller. “My darling Harry. We’ve just marked the first anniversary of his death. We were together for 17 years, 17 glorious years. He was a good man, a naughty good man, a loveable rogue. I miss him like hell.”

I had approached this subject with trepidation but Logue is disarmingly frank about her feelings as she describes Miller’s final years, as a once sharp brain deliquesced into dementia.

“You know what?” she says. “It’s ironic, and a lot of people probably can’t get their heads around this, but the intimacy between us was profound. I felt privileged to care for someone I loved and adored, to see him out.”

As if to lighten the mood I ask if she had met Miller, a significant player on the eastern suburbs social scene, in her Double Bay pie shop. “Almost,” she answers with a chuckle. “I had this idea for a TV show so I got my hands on a hand-held camera and made a crude, wobbly little 10-minute pilot and sent it to him by courier with a box of my chocolate cupcakes. “

Those cupcakes clinched the deal. “You know Harry. He was on the phone five minutes after the goodies landed on his desk and I was there the following morning.

“We never got the TV show up but we fell in love. We became inseparable.

“I was well and truly on my way in the business. He did give me advice but I am fiercely independent in all ways, but look, when I met Harry I felt I’d met my match. He was never going to ask me when I’m getting home from work.”

Logue bought an apartment in Bellevue Hill last year, but recovery from loss might have been more difficult had Logue not had 12½ha spread near Oberon. just over the Blue Mountains on the NSW Central Tablelands.

“It’s the coldest place on the planet, but I love it.” As I write I check the temperature there today. Three degrees and raining.

“Twenty-five years ago, my twin sister, the artist Joanna Logue, stumbled across Essington Park when she was out that way, soaking up the atmosphere of the Australian bush as many fine landscape painters have done before her.

“We girls and our brother Andy, a professional chef, were all born in the country and have country blood pumping through our veins. We couldn’t resist the pull and bought it together as a place we would always call home.”

Built in 1860, the house has had a major makeover thanks to Joanna and Simmone who restored it to its original glory. It serves not only as a place of retreat, reflection and renewal but also “the glue that has held us together as a family over the past 20 years.”

“Joanna, Andy and I are all crazy foodies, and the kitchen, orchard and vegetable garden at Essington have been the inspiration for many meals there over the years, cooked over an ancient wood burning stove or on occasions, a roaring open fire. The kitchen is the heartbeat of the house.” Logue claims she can feel the benign presence of all the families that have lived there before them. “It is a very spiritual place.”

Almost without exception she tries to be there for Sunday and Monday. Only a big wedding or party can keep her in town on Saturdays.

“I never desensitise to the beauty of the place. I still get goose bumps when I drive through the front gate and feel sentimental when I leave. The two days at Essington per week gives me time to refresh, quiet time for contemplation and to get my creative juices flowing.” Like Voltaire’s hero Candide, she also tends to her garden. “If I hadn’t been obsessed with cooking I’d have been a gardener,

“I say to people who are buying a country property, ‘the first thing to do is to plant trees’.

“I have an old Triumph commercial gas stove in the kitchen and a large fireplace as tall as me that I often cook over ... if I’m not in the kitchen I’m in the garden and I’m in heaven.”

It’s hard work keeping a life balance but Logue seems to have risen triumphantly to the challenge. Hard work has paid off.

“My job is to work, to plan to grow the business over the next five years while keeping that wonky artisanal taste to my food.

“I’d just like to see my pies in every supermarket in the country.”

On a recent Qantas flight she was bumped up to business class where she was served “one of my little lemon curd cheesecakes with my name and e-address on the wrapper. I wanted to turn around and say to the person behind: ‘That’s my cake.’”