Baking Guides

Every December I tell myself I'll sort the mince pies early, and every December I'm rolling pastry at ten the night before the school do with a jar of mincemeat and three kids asking what's for tea. …

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Every parkin recipe I've ever looked at wants a 20cm square tin, and I haven't got one. What I've got is loaf tins, because I sell them. So last autumn I gave up hunting for the square tin and made i …

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I don't know about you, but in our house, any Christmas cake we get given is usually still sitting in the cupboard in February. It's always just a massive, foil-wrapped brick getting harder by the da …

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Shop-bought English muffins are a bit sad, aren't they. Dry, no holes to speak of, and stale the day after you open the packet. So one Saturday I made my own, because it's flour, yeast, milk and a fr …

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Baking little cakes should be one of the easy pleasures, and too often it ends in exasperation with half the cake still sitting in the tin's grooves. If you're shopping for a new mini cake tin, what y …

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There is a particularly disappointing moment when you get those perfect looking yorkies out of the oven and realise you have to rip them to pieces just to get them off the pan. Bye bye instagram-perfe …

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My air fryer lives on the worktop because the oven takes twenty minutes to get anywhere and I am not a patient woman. Half an hour into an episode I'm hungry, and I've learnt the hard way to bake the …

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Baking has fashions, exactly like clothes or paint colours. If you are looking for inspiration what to buy for your baking fanatical friend or family member, have a read through. This is what we belie …

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Sourdough is harder on a loaf tin than anything else you will bake in one. A cake batter goes into a cold tin, sits there for fifty minutes and comes out. A tin sourdough is shaped, dropped in, covere …

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Most donut pans disappoint in one of two ways. The floppy silicone sort folds in half as you lift it, slops batter across the oven shelf, and turns out rings so pale they look unbaked. The thin metal …

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Most mini cheesecake disasters happen in the last thirty seconds. The bake went well, the tops set without a crack, everything cooled properly. Then the first one comes out in two pieces with the bisc …

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You tip the tin, give it a confident shake, and the loaf moves about a centimetre. Then it stops. You shake harder, the top half comes away in your hand, and the base stays behind, welded in place lik …

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