After many weeks of sweet treats and sugar I decided to off-set the scale with savoury and plenty of salt. I haven’t made bread in a while because, while the steps are simple and the ingredient list short, proving is time-consuming. However I had some time over Christmas so I could wait the hour it took for my dough to double in size. I felt like a proud parent watching their new born lift their own head for the first time when I peeled back the tea towel and saw the surface made smooth with its own expansion; I’ve tasted… Continue reading

This week I made ginger sandwich cookies and golly golly gosh are they delicious. I always use baking soda and baking powder interchangeably or if the recipe says ‘baking soda’ I’ll do half baking powder and half baking powder because science. They’re soft and rose a fair amount so they don’t look like the images on the recipe … I’m getting a suspicion that my science is not as effective as I thought. I’m writing this on Christmas day. Merry Christmas. I’m sure you think I have better things to do like eat turkey, drink prosecco for breakfast, and stand… Continue reading

This week I made a coffee, cardamom, and walnut traybake. I love the flavour of cardamom and the uniform squares of a traybake are so satisfying. One of my small joys is when people see them they say ‘How did you get them to all look so neat and the same?’ and I smile and say I don’t know.  I’ve been thinking this week about the new year and my New Year’s resolutions. I love making resolutions and I note them all down in January only to rediscover them sitting unopened at the bottom of my notes below shopping lists… Continue reading

After a month of no baking I returned to the wooden spoon with a banana bread. No, we haven’t jumped back two years and are back in lockdown again, I just love a bit of b bread. I used to say I didn’t like it because I don’t like bananas, but then one day I tried banana bread cookies and I kept slotting them into my mouth before I finished chewing like a child and I knew banana bread and me were meant to be. I moved home for a month from November to December and my parents’ house isn’t… Continue reading

This week I am back and baking up a storm! What better way to return than with a matcha and raspberry loaf cake. I love matcha but got put off cooking with it when I watched Bake Off once and Mary Berry said she thought the taste was ‘grassy’. I don’t think it’s grassy at all and Mary clearly just has poor taste. This is my first time baking with matcha and I am so excited. Matcha reminds me of being in Japan and at my Obasan’s place in Higashi Kakogawa. It reminds me of when me and my sister… Continue reading

There’s no baking post this week because I’ve been unwell and have been using every extra minute I can claw onto to rest. I am so bored of resting now. When I’m ill I feel so lame and weak, like a sickly Mediaeval child waiting for the Quack to come round and tell me I’m dying of an awful plague. I don’t feel like myself at all and not just in a physical sense but also because I haven’t done anything or seen anyone in a while I feel like my personality is gone. I haven’t been laughing with my… Continue reading

Moving back to London has meant reconnecting with my secondary school friends and it’s been a real pleasure. I hadn’t seen them since I moved schools for sixth form and I always followed their lives on Instagram but was unsure if we’d ever be active friends again. We were friends from ages eleven to sixteen; so really we grew up together. I remember having a lot of strange, stupid fun at school and, looking back, we were great friends because we enjoyed playing and doing silly things and I’m very grateful that I had friends like that and wasn’t peer… Continue reading

I decided to do another easy bake this week. I was worried about messing it up and then being afraid to go near my mixing bowl ever again, so I chose lemon and poppy seed cake. I never used to mind being bad at things because I felt if I practised them enough I would learn. Now if I am not good at something immediately I feel surprised and upset. Being bad at things feels like an attack on my personality; I don’t know when I got so big for my boots. Recently I’ve seen TikTok compilation videos of men… Continue reading

I wanted to start easy for the return to the wooden spoon and I needed an occasion to bake for. I have thought about baking again a few times since I moved, however I always found an excuse not to, normally ‘I’m tired’ – it’s pretty fair, I am often tired. Somehow when I have it in my mind that I am doing something for my friends it makes me more committed to it. If I don’t do it, I feel like I am letting them down on something I have never even told them about. I don’t mind letting… Continue reading