Hi, I’m Hannah, I started baking regularly when my three-year old caught me stealing from his treat jar and I had to find another way of getting my four o’clock sugar fix.  Baking a cake a week was my way of appeasing my guilty conscience.   I’m sure I’m not alone in owning a library’s worth of recipe books, but despite my groaning shelves, I always made the same things; variations on a theme of Victoria sponge, or a batch of banana muffins.

Let’s Bake the Books is about my attempt to stop being a timid baker.  I tackle the recipes that I’ve gazed at but dismissed as too tricky, downright terrifying or, frankly, not worth the effort: mini doughnuts to decorate cupcakes, homemade custard creams, Battenberg cake, Eccles cakes… the list goes on.

I follow the recipe and record the results:  was the cake harder or easier to bake than I expected?  Were there any particularly difficult bits? How long did it take? How did it taste?  Would I make it again?  I’ve had some disasters, a few triumphs, and a lot of enjoyable baking along the way.

I started back in 2015 with doughnut cupcakes from the Hummingbird Bakery “Home Sweet Home” cookbook which, thankfully, turned out OK.  They didn’t put me off adventurous baking completely anyway!

If you have any questions about Let’s Bake the Books, or if there are any tricky recipes that you’d like me to try, please get in touch using the form below.