A special educational needs teaching assistant and cookery enthusiast has gone viral on social media for his roast potatoes. 

Food blogger Finbar Breslin likes to practise his homegrown recipes on his wife and four children.

And when he posted a snap of his bacon-fat roasted spuds onto the Rate My Roast group on Facebook, and the reaction was overwhelming. 

More than 1,300 people liked the recipe and lots of people commented on the post with a flood of glowing compliments. 

The reaction took me a bit by surprise really,” the 26-year-old from West Swindon said. 

“I posted my bacon fat recipe, which had taken me three years to perfect, and it blew up and got 1,300 likes.

Finbar’s roasties got such a big reaction that his recipe was featured in a national newspaper. 

“I woke up the next day to a message from the Daily Star asking if they could post the recipe which took me by surprise.”

Receiving recognition for something he does for fun and has come up with himself means the world to him.

“Cooking is a hobby for me, so I would never have expected people to take that seriously and react the way they did. Even when I go to work and colleagues are praising me for my food that I bring them I brush it off.

“But when you get that amount of attention for it from people you don’t know it’s a real big achievement and it makes me proper chuffed to see what happened.”

His children are his biggest fans and toughest critics. 

“I have four girls and another on the way - there’s Lana, seven,  Abbey four, Olivia, three, and the youngest Rosalie has just turned one, she’s my biggest critic,” he said. 

“I’m fortunate that my children all have great palates. The household favourite is Italian and I enjoy cooking pasta dishes, but they also love Mexican Tex-Mex. 

“I enjoy playing around with ingredients, I watch a lot of Gordon Ramsay and Masterchef and then I just come up with my own crazy ideas and see which herbs match together. I know I’ve come up with a good recipe when I feed it to my children and I see empty plates afterwards.”

Finbar has started a food blog with his brother-in-law called The Flat Cap Cooks where he’s hoping to put up recipes, daily videos and tips and tricks for cooking.

But he has bigger aspirations of eventually becoming a full-time chef. 

He said: “I adore cooking for mealtimes with my family, they’re moments I love.”