Stuck for a Christmas present for the baker in your life - here’s all you knead to know!

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.

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.

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.

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.