When Skye goes bushwalking, she doesn’t just see trees, leaves and scrub. She sees her dinner shopping list, with native Australian ingredients like macadamia nuts, wild limes and Davidson’s plums inspiring her to cook up a storm.

“I love to cook with native Australian ingredients and am a big advocate of using raw, organic and sustainable foods,” says the self-confessed yippee – part hippie, part yuppie. “The reason why you would lean towards using raw food in a dish is that the ingredients are alive – all of the nutritional content is retained and it hasn’t been cooked out. There’s a real vitality and freshness about that kind of food.”

While her style of cooking may be unorthodox, Skye is keen to show off how the ingredients in Mother Nature’s pantry can taste amazing without boiling, searing or baking.

“There was some resistance from the judges at first, but hopefully I’ll win them over,” admits Skye, adding that not everything she serves up is raw and she always cooks meat. “I’ll describe some of the raw desserts to someone and when they taste it, they can’t believe it’s a wild lime tart with macadamia splash. For something like that, I’ll blend avocado for the base – it’s great because of its natural fat content – then I’ll use the flesh and milk from a young coconut, and use a low GI sugar substitute. You’d be amazed just how beautiful blended avocado and lime can taste.”

Every time Skye creates one of her dishes, it’s in dedication to her younger sister Erin, who tragically died in 2002. Erin was devoted to the world of sustainable, organic and raw food movement, and her death inspired Skye to learn more about the style of cooking.

“My sister, who I was very close to, passed away seven years ago when she was 26-years-old,” says Skye. “She was living in Indonesia and she got cerebral malaria. She had married an Indonesian just before she died and was pregnant at the time. It happened so quickly. We were best mates and it was a very challenging time to say the least.”

Understandably, her family was left shattered. “Food really ties in with all of this because my family needed a way to let go of our grief and we needed a way to rejuvenate and heal,” says Skye. “The whole raw food thing that my sister was really into played a part in that, along with yoga. Here, I’m cooking for my sister. I feel a lot closer to her when I’m cooking the way I do.”

Skye has come along way since she learnt to make pikelets as a seven-year-old from a child’s cookbook that her mum gave her, and she hopes that MasterChef Australia will help her achieve her dream of opening a dessert bar in Brisbane.