Helen Mirren worked hard to become an academy award winning actress, but according to the Press Association, her biggest struggle right now is mashed potatoes.

“I love cream, I love mashed potatoes. I like Christmas pudding, I like Christmas pudding with butter on it. Can you imagine?!” she said when asked about guilty pleasures, “I really love very, very fattening food so occasionally I indulge myself, but you do have to be careful.”

Food is the central topic of her new movie, The Hundred-Foot Journey. Mirren and her cast-mates took the time to bond over food. Taking fellow actor Manish Dayal out to a three-hour-long feast, she told the Press Association she “forced Manish to eat escargots, snails, for the first time in his life”.

The process has had its downs as well as ups. WENN made a report during a trip to a London culinary school called Le Cordon Bleu to promote The Hundred-Foot Journey, where Mirren donned a chef’s hat and apron. Naturally, she started making a pancake. However, when she attempted to flip the creation, the whole thing spilled out onto her work surface, right in front of her co-stars.

The whole process of becoming French may have been too much for the actress, since she is now looking to sell her house in France and move to Italy. “I own a house in France, it’s actually sadly up for sale now. I did have a house there for more than 20 years. But now my husband and I have moved to Italy. That’s our home so now I’m trying to learn Italian,” she said according to Bang Showbiz, ”My French is quite good but a bit rusty. I certainly wouldn’t call it fluent but it sounds good. It’s the result of my sort of British love affair with France and everything French. When I was in my teens, they (the French) seemed the coolest, chicest people on the planet and I desperately wanted to be French. I got myself a French boyfriend and that was the closest I could get to it. I was 14 and still know him. Then I did work in Paris for a year or more.”

Helen Mirren, Om Puri & Manish Dayal were at Le Cordon Bleu London. Read why: http://t.co/xH6xGUUCV4 #the100ftjourney pic.twitter.com/B26IC461UM

— Le Cordon Bleu (@lcbeurope) September 3, 2014

Even though she lived there for a long time, she said her French character was very different compared to her British background: “Oh, God, she’s so not close to me. As a Brit, we’ve always looked at the French and [wondered], Why do they never look untidy? We’ve got a terrific inferiority complex when it comes to them.”

The Hundred-Foot Journey currently sits at 65% on Rotten Tomatoes.