After years in the doldrums, home baking is making quite a revival. It began with a renewed interest in cooking from scratch, driven by the combined factors of the popularity of cookery programmes and recipe books and consumers wanting to emulate these, as well as by health and diet issues and a growing interest in the provenance of the food they eat – if you make something yourself, you know exactly what is in it. The emotional fulfilment derived from cooking for and with others also has an important role to play

As it stands, market analysts forecast that the value of home baking products would reach £491m in 2008, up 10 per cent on 2006, and is expected to hit £550m by 2011. Considering the current economic climate and the widely held views that the recession is set to bite for some time, that figure could well be beaten, as more and more consumers roll up their sleeves and start baking at home as a means of economising.

SPONGE CAKES, BUNS AND TARTS

Sometimes I fantasise to myself about having nothing better to do but keep my house clean and tidy and to spend time baking, just like we used to when I was a child. In fact, one of my most enduring childhood memories is of my mother rolling out pastry at the bench in the kitchen, with great big floury hand-prints all over her backside, as she continually wiped her hands on her trousers instead of using a cloth! I don’t think safefood would approve, especially considering the same trousers had probably been in the pigsty and the cow byre earlier in the day!

My mother baked at least once a week and I was in the thick of it with her – usually scraping the remnants of the cake mix out of the bowl with my finger and eating it raw! Mummy’s repertoire usually included sponge cakes, which were made into sandwiches with lashings of thickly whipped cream and fruit in the middle – usually tinned ‘wee oranges’ as we called them, but better known as Mandarin slices. In summer, when our own strawberries were ready in the garden, these replaced the tinned fruit, much to our delight, though my sister always came out in hives afterwards.

Buns were made every week by the many dozen and it was a real treat when they were also iced, with me being given the all important job of sprinkling hundreds and thousands or jelly shapes on the icing before it set. I was also always tasked with putting the bun cases into the baking tray beforehand. Occasionally, we had the exceptional treat of caramel squares.

Tarts – rhubarb, apple or apple and wild blackberry from the hedges round the farm – were another of mummy’s great stand-bys, usually served with Bird’s Eye custard (made from powder) and whipped cream.

MAKING DANISH PASTRY

My father was Danish and had an incredibly sweet tooth, so anything mummy baked never lasted long with him around. Sometimes he would get nostalgic for a taste of home and he was never subtle about letting mummy know – he would arrive home with a lump of fresh yeast in a paper bag from one of the home bakeries in town, which meant that he wanted Danish pastry!

Making Soster Kage (which translates as ‘sister cake’ for some obscure reason I have no knowledge of) and Kringle Kage was an all-day excercise, starting with the yeast being put into a taste of warm water in a glass milk bottle, stoppered with some cotton wool, and left to start fermenting on the stand above the solid fuel range in the kitchen. At this stage it stank to high heavens – at least it did to us as children – but boy how it was transformed when the finished product came out of the oven.

First, though, the dough had to be made and then left to rise for 20 minutes or so. It was then rolled out and lumps of margarine sprinkled over it before being rolled into a ball again and left to rise once more – if my memory serves me correctly, this was done a couple of times. I can’t recall the exact details of how each pastry was completed, but the final part of making the Kringle Kage involved rolling it out into a very long flat piece of dough; dried fruit and more lumps of margarine were sprinkled along the centre of this; then the edges were folded over and the whole thing was plaited over itself to form loops, which were liberally dusted with granulated sugar before baking.

HOME BAKING SUPPLIES: www.neillsflour.co.uk – Skea Eggs.

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