Blake Lively has spent nearly a decade in an industry she initially had no interest in pursuing, but from the moment she appeared on TV screens in Gossip Girl, there’s been no denying her allure—just ask Leonardo DiCaprio, who was so under her spell, he engaged in several PDAs during their brief dalliance (we still want to know how she pulled that off). Today she’s married to Canada’s own Ryan Reynolds, has worked with Oscar winning directors such as Oliver Stone and Ben Affleck and this past summer launched Preserve, her own lifestyle website.

Amid the frenzy of the Cannes Film Festival and her duties as an official spokesperson for L’Oreal Paris back in May, Lively sat down with FASHION’s beauty director Lesa Hannah to discuss Hollywood, cakes and that time she visited babies in Sudbury with Reynolds.

On avoiding Hollywood at first:
“It was never that I didn’t want to be an actor because I thought it was a bad industry. It was just that my whole family did it and I wanted to do something different. I was the youngest of five kids and I wanted to create my own path and my own sort of legacy.”

On her announced visit to the pediatric unit of a Sudbury hospital last year:
“I have six nieces and nephews, so for me, children are really what gets my heart going. I’ve spent time at St. Jude’s in the States and so any chance I get to go to a children’s hospital, I do. I try to do that in a way that’s it’s on a more personal level, but that one became sort of a public thing that we didn’t intend, but it’s great to do that.”

On how her mom’s cakes made her see the power of baking:
“She just created a whole life, a personality out of this thing. It was very much art and a celebration, and it made every holiday so special. I would be so proud when she would bring them into my class, and all of the kids in school would just freak out. She would let other kids help decorate too. And I suffer from the opposite, I’m very precious about it, it has to be perfect.”

On Age of Adaline, her first movie post-Gossip Girl.
“I really wanted some time to myself and to focus on other things that I loved, so that when I did it again I would be really re-invigorated. And it took a movie that I really couldn’t say ‘no’ to, you know, because there’s plenty that I would have done, but it was really important to have that time. So when I read that one, I said, ‘I can’t not be in this movie, I have to do this movie.’”

You can grab your copy of the Fashion Magazine October 2014 issue starring Blake Lively, from September 15, 2014.