It all started with my English Nan Mary.

 Hello! I am starting this blog as a way to document me baking my way out of the current pandemic lockdown and to show those who care to see my baking triumphs/disasters! Hopefully not too many of the latter. 

My baking journey started a long time ago , in a galaxy far, far away, in my Nan's kitchen in a small town in the West Midlands of England. My Nan raised two young children by herself during WWII when my Grandad was off fighting for our country. (Thankfully he returned). While doing that with very little resources she baked a lot of desserts for her family and got to be really, really good. In fact, she won a lot of first prizes at local fetes, and at the Women's Institute functions. I have vivid memories of being in her kitchen, watching her Kitchen Aid mixer whirl around as she carefully added the flour and cocoa powder to her sponge cakes, rolled her dough for her famous cheese scones. She taught me lots of tricks to get the perfect scone dough and how to never curdle your batters. I will teach these to my child and no other human. (A girl has to have some secrets) As my Nan got older she would start to do some funny things like forget to add salt, or forget to turn on the oven, but I knew one day that her baking time might soon end  when she would bake pies and instead of labelling them before they went in the freezer with a pen she decided to make an initial in pastry on top of the pie the represented that pie, for instance an R for Rhubarb pie. One day, after a glorious Sunday roast dinner, we all sat with our bowl and cream anxious to get a slice of the mincemeat pie she had made and frozen earlier. She cut into the pie and we took a bite and screamed, "Oh no, the M was for Beef Mince not Mincemeat! 

During my teen years, I was off doing teen things and baking was not on the top of my hobbies. By the time I was 20 I had already fallen in love with an American boy who I had met when I was 17 on vacation and we decided to get married and I quickly moved to the States so my Nan never really got to see how my every once in a while baking turned into one of my biggest passions. 

I love to bake from the British recipe books that I not only brought over with me all those years ago but also from the recipe books that have recently been bought for me. One of those being Paul Hollywood's 100 Great Breads. I had the crazy notion to bake all 100 of those breads and document the results here! So if you aren't bored off your mind already, welcome, I hope that you enjoy my blog. 

My beautiful Nan on her Wedding Day.