If they don't like the taste, they don't mince their words. A bake-off roll can quickly become "papier-mâché" or "it smells exactly like cardboard in the stationer's". But Katharina Hadem and her 12-year-old daughter Emilia are so charming and authentic about it that, as a viewer, you feel grateful for this honesty. After all, that's the whole point. So mother and daughter do their job damn well. Above all, they really enjoy it. "The children think it's wonderful," Katharina Hadem recounts. "Depending on the product, they either show off about it at school or let it quietly drop under the table, but they always take part." Two of her three daughters are already young actresses themselves. Only seven-year-old Marie has not yet followed in her mother's footsteps. When the television crew turns up, the first stop is make-up — for the daughters too. The first spots are covered up and the hair is made nice. And then the products come out onto the kitchen table. "We have no idea what brand each product is. But it's often organic when we like something. I'm such an organic-mum type. It could be that my children are already calibrated that way too," Katharina Hadem muses with a laugh. The attractive actress is not only good as a taster, however. She has skills that have made more than one man in her neighbourhood look on in amazement. Katharina Hadem holds a chainsaw licence, which makes her ideally suited to pruning the neighbours' trees. So she can hardly wait for the next chainsaw test. "I come from the Siegerland, and back then everyone had to muck in to prune the trees. An injury there is like an initiation rite. So they'd say: at last Katharina's hurt herself too. Now she can really do it!"
The Most Charming Testers
