Having a baker in your life makes Christmas present-giving easy, for the baker, by nature, is an obsessive, who will always want to acquire more books and better kit.
Here are some suggestions for presents for the your beloved baker:
Books:
This year has seen some exceptional books by Irish home bakers. Olivia Goodwillie’s Biscuits, Breads and Cakes from 30 years at Lavistown, shouts reliability and knowledge and practicality. There's a recipe for a ciabatta-style bread from an Italian friend’s mother, for flapjacks and jumblies, honey and almond tart and many other family favourites.
Earlier this year we bought a copy of Burren Wild Baker by bean-to-bar chocolate-maker Kasha Connolly. Unusually for a baking book, it divides its recipes according to the seasons. The winter recipes include Coffee and Prune baked Cheesecake and Dark Chocolate Truffle Cake with Lemon Cream Cloud.
Limerick Baker Valerie O’Connor’s Bread On The Table was also published earlier in the year (O’Brien Press). This is a very well produced book, which has a modern feel. The breads look gorgeous, and the instructions are easy to follow.
Catherine Fulvio’s Christmas book this year is Bake Like an Italian (Gill and MacMillan) and there are some fantastic breads here to extend your range of loaf styles: Olive-studded Puglia bread, Music Sheet flatbread, Sicilian Semolina bread plus a reliable ciabatta and focaccia.
Of the international books published this year, Tartine Book No 3 by Chad Robertson (Chronicle Books) takes us into the world of ancient, sprouted, and double-fermented grains. To get the most out of this book you need to be quite an experienced baker, but for the obsessive bakers amongst us, this will take your baking into another league.
Finally, summing up the baking obsession perfectly, comes In Search of the Perfect Loaf by journalist Samuel Fromartz (Viking). Fromartz is an environment and business journalist as well as being an obsessive home-baker who has supplied Alice Waters. The chapters are divided into essays about bread, the most enjoyable of which is the first essay on the French baguette, which reads like a novel and ends with a fantastic recipe for a levain baguette which - as a self-confessed baking obsessive - is top of my list when it comes to new recipes discovered this year.
Gifts:
To attain the correct hydration in baking you really need to have Banneton proving baskets. I was delighted to source some from Firehouse Bakery, in Wicklow, who will supply if you ask nicely. A gift voucher for a day at the Firehouse Bread School on Heir Island, is also just about the nicest present anybody with an interest in baking could have.
It always helps when shopkeepers are enthusiasts themselves, and no better than Andrew and Maria of The Cookware Company - which just happens to be our local cookware store in Bantry, but can be yours too, because of their excellent on-line service. Throughout the year, I’ve bought exciting products from the store, including a little Dutch oven, which cooks loaves to an even perfection even in a dodgy domestic oven. Plus, they have an extensive variety of baking tins to shape loaves in every way you can think of. This shop is a Mecca for the baker possessed.
Sally McKenna
