Spelt and Honey Tear and Share Bread

I’ve had to hide this in a cupboard because I can’t stop eating it. This spelt and honey tear and share bread is incredibly moreish and a good accompaniment to lots of different autumn meals. Eat it for breakfast or tea, split and spread with butter and honey; dunk it in a bowl of spicy pumpkin soup; or devour it with a good cheese. Continue reading

Mrs Portly’s Panzanella

Panzanella is one of those excellent Italian recipes where frugality transcends virtue to become something greater. It marries stale bread with sweet, juicy tomatoes to give you the perfect summer salad, one with flavour and a bit of heft. Continue reading

Hot Cross Buns

An Easter treat, these spicy, fruity yeasted buns are usually in the shops from oh, just after Christmas, but as usual home-made are better if you can spare the time. As so many of us are self-isolating thanks to coronavirus, making them is a pleasant way of whiling away an afternoon, and probably the only way to get your mitts on them with the supermarket shelves being so empty. Continue reading

Home-made Crumpets

Shop-bought crumpets can, as Elizabeth David said with characteristic disdain in English Bread and Yeast Cookery, be “terrible travesties…perhaps…delivered direct from a plastics factory”. Though I’ve eaten my fair share of those, toasted and slathered in butter, home-made are in a class of their own. However, they are tricky to get right. Continue reading

Brioche Burger Buns

Pretty much every burger I’ve had recently that I’ve most enjoyed has been loaded into a brioche bun. This isn’t exactly fast food – you need to prepare the dough the night before you plan to bake – but I’d like to share the recipe because they are streets ahead of supermarket brioche.  Continue reading

Quince Doughnuts

I love quince, it’s one of my favourite fruits and I’m always a bit bemused when people say they don’t know what to do with them, because they’re so versatile. I suppose it’s a lack of familiarity: because their shelf life is short, supermarkets tend not to stock them. Continue reading