All you knead to know - a bakers gift guide
Stuck for a Christmas present for the baker in your life - here’s all you knead to know!
Go with the grain.
I’m hugely in favour of eating more whole grains - you may have spotted my new ‘Baking with whole grains’ class in 2025! Bread and cakes made with wholemeal flour taste more delicious and are also full of the fibre, essential oils and minerals which are lost in high extraction milling processes. This month’s recipe. ‘Spelt, Pear and Ginger muffins’, uses wholegrain spelt flour.
Leaf raking, mugs of tea and a hefty slice of cake.
Have you ever noticed that life’s greatest pleasures sometimes happen when you stop being busy - however enjoyable the activity. I think this is true of gardening tea breaks - especially when there’s an autumnal nip in the air.
We’re jammin’ (and I hope you like jammin’ too…)
This month I’m enjoying the bounty of summer. I’ve already made some apricot, lavender and blueberry jam and now, as the sun is starting to shine again, I’m excited to see the hard green baubles of wild stone fruit becoming soft, sticky and luminously yellow - ripe for picking and preserving.
Baking in Norway - fjords, dog sledding and viking feasts!
This month I’m taking my baking adventures to Norway as I cross from Bergen in the west to Oslo in the East with a week of baking at the magical Huso Lodge in Hemsedal.
Baking with bay and other kitchen stories
My wholegrain conversion continues apace. The more I learn about the benefits of eating the whole grain of a cereal, as opposed to roller milled white flour where the bran and most of the nutrition is sifted out, the more I’m enjoying the taste and flavours of Stoneground Wholemeal flour.
This cake uses spelt flour for a lovely nutty flavour and includes one of my favourite spices - bay..
Seven seeds of rye
Bread is such an important part of my life that admitting I have a favourite feels a little like confessing to having a favourite child(!) but if pushed I would probably choose a darkly complex, sweetly sour, dense and satisfying Scandinavian rye bread.
Crispbreads and fancy rolling pins.
Crispbreads and fancy rolling pins - baking gifts for Christmas.
THE FIRST LOAF
The First Loaf: our ancestors knew best.
In 1864 yeast was synthesised in a laboratory and became widely available. Fast forward 100 years to 1961 and the ‘Chorleywood process’, as it became known, introduced the world to fast processed mass produced bread and suddenly the world seemed to become ‘gluten intolerant’ overnight.
Somewhere along the line we lost sight of the best way to make nourishing, wholesome, digestible bread. The wild yeast method (AKA sourdough) forces us to slow down and consider more traditional ways of raising bread that’s tastier and better for us.