The Baker's Daughter: Timeless Recipes From Four Generations of Bakers
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About this ebook
Louise Johncox comes from a long line of bakers and confectioners. As a child she would sit on a flour tin at her father's side and eat whatever was fresh from the oven - a hot bread roll or a fluffy piece of sponge - and when her father, a master baker, retired, Louise decided it was time to capture his wisdom and baking expertise, writing down his recipes for the first time and preserving his magical legacy for her children.
With a Foreword by Albert Roux, The Baker's Daughter weaves Louise's delightful childhood memories of life in her family tea shop with her father's delicious recipes for you to try at home, honed by over forty years of instinct and experience. From classic cream cakes and traditional buns, to celebration cakes, handcrafted chocolates and her father's signature cream meringues, these recipes come laden with the sights, smells and warmth of the tea room and bakehouse.
Louise shares more stories about her family teashop in her ebook memoir A Life Shaped By Cakes: The Memoir of The Baker's Daughter.
'An affectionate memoir that will both entertain with stories from a bygone world of tea and cakes and inspire people to bake' Albert Roux, OBE, KFO
Louise Johncox
Louise Johncox is a freelance writer and journalist who has written for the The Times, Telegraph and Guardian newspapers. She completed her PhD in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Louise hails from a long family line of bakers and pastry chefs. She lives in Surrey and two children, Lara and Joe.
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The Baker's Daughter - Louise Johncox
right).
chapter one
The Baker’s Little Helpers
Favourite Bakes for Children
Every Christmas and Easter, long after my childhood years, I would receive a box of chocolate peppermint creams, handmade by my father. The scent of sweet peppermint and bitter dark cocoa would hit me as I ran my eyes over the round-ridged chocolates in dark brown ruffled cases. Instantly, I’d be transported to the chocolate display cabinet in Peter’s.
Suddenly, I’m ten years old, peering through a fringe of brown hair. I am sitting on a red-cushioned stool next to my younger sister, Fuby, who looks like a doll with her short brown hair and chocolate button eyes. We are folding white napkins and making up the white cake boxes inscribed in red with Peter’s. We watch customers come and go from a table close to the counter in the tea room, we inhale the sweet scents and munch on animal biscuits.
There is a humming sound of conversation, rising and falling, and the clatter of cake forks in the tea room where customers enjoy afternoon tea: cream cakes, toasted teacakes, scones and other pastries. Macaroons, Madeira sponge, Battenberg and Florentines are some of the flavours of the day. Customers use white boned cake knives and forks to cut much anticipated pastries. Twinings loose-leaf tea is served in delicate china cups. For most people, afternoon tea conjures up tea, scones and clotted cream, but for me it is about the arrival of the glass stand containing eight cream cakes on a white doily, a meringue in the middle.
My mother, Frankie, captivates customers with her natural charisma, blind to her own charms. For one who works in a cake shop and has had four children, she is surprisingly slim. She is ‘everyone’s mother’, as my brother Johnny puts it. Mum is always busy welcoming and serving.
A customer asks for four meringues. Mum goes to the fridge with a pair of silver-plated tongs and is careful not to crush the treat that loyal customers travel miles to taste.
My father Peter’s place is in the bakehouse, where he practises his craft of making bread and cakes. His large rugby-player’s hands knead the dough, day in, day out, his forearms twice the size of the average man’s. Peter’s trademark sideburns and thick head of wavy hair are always coated in a layer of flour. He smells of whatever he is making at the time – in the morning, Danish pastries and doughnuts, in the afternoon, the scent is of toasted teacakes and Welsh rarebit.
On Mondays, the day the shop closes, Dad makes chocolates, swapping his baker’s white apron, smeared with ingredients, for his white chocolatier’s coat with buttons down the front. My Great Uncle Charlie calls the process ‘magic’ as Dad conjures up exquisite chocolate creations from twenty-pound slabs of dark Belgian Callebaut chocolate. He sits on his stainless steel flour tin in front of his ‘chocolate machine’ – a metal container filled with molten chocolate. On the left side of the bench lie peppermint discs and the ancient dipping fork, a stainless steel instrument used to pick up the fondant sweet centres and sink them into the melted vat of chocolate. Dad dips his finger in the chocolate and licks; he has no thermometer or thermostat to measure it.
How do you know it’s ready?
I ask.
Instinct and experience,
he says.
Peter’s greetings all involve invitations to eat: Do you want something to eat darling?
Before I can answer he slips me a chocolate. I know from experience to accept or he will look dejected. Some fathers say, ‘I love you’. My father gives me chocolates and cake.
MY CHILDHOOD MEMORIES are strongly shaped by the tea shop and Church Street, the small street on which it traded. I will never forget the yellow boxes of Cadbury’s Flakes in the storeroom. In Peter’s hands these became the thatched roof on my favourite pink cottage cake. Across the road was the newsagent, Hayden’s, where I bought milk chocolate Curly Wurlies, not bitter like the dark chocolate from Belgium. Next door was Haslets haberdashery store, ‘The Harrods of Weybridge’, where I played hide and seek with my sister on three crammed floors. Frankie bought dressmaking patterns there and made most of our clothes on her Singer sewing machine.
Peter’s was sandwiched between the Midland Bank and Artistic Treasures, an upmarket china shop run by Mr and Mrs Reece. Peter went there to buy presents for Frankie and Mr and Mrs Reece would often escape their business for tea and cake at Peter’s.
The two most important shops were Robson’s, the butcher on the High Street, and Brockwell’s, the grocer’s on Baker Street, where we bought fruit and vegetables. Peter’s order for Robson’s would include sausage meat for sausage rolls, ham for omelettes and minced meat for Cornish pasties and rissoles. Mum always gave me a bag of doughnuts to take to Mr Robson, a friendly fellow with a moustache, who wore a blue-and-white striped apron. In return, he gave us spare bones for the bakehouse dog and occasional steaks. Gordon, my oldest brother, a chatterbox, worked there from the age of twelve. The exchange worked well: the butcher got a constant supply of cakes and some help, while the baker got cut-price meat and some peace. Whenever I saw Gordon at work he’d be yapping away to Mr Robson who often had a meat cleaver in hand; Gordon learnt how to pluck and gut chickens and make sausages. Why anyone would want to swap being in a cake shop for a stinky butcher’s packed full of dead animals was a mystery to me. My other brother, Johnny, always helped in the bakehouse, rolling the jam doughnuts in sugar before cycling to school. One day, he came off his bike while eating a doughnut. Dad had bread in the oven so Johnny went in the ambulance alone. Mum, ever the nurse, rushed to the hospital afterwards while Peter ensured the bread didn’t burn.
1 The baker’s youngest daughter, Fuby, with cousin Sarah.
2 Lara and her fourth birthday cake, kids at the ready.
3 A chocolate fort cake with miniature soldiers.
4 Peter’s pink cottage – my favourite childhood birthday cake.
5 A tea party with friends, wearing one of Mum’s homemade party dresses.
6 The baker’s grandson, Christopher, with a rugby pitch birthday cake.
On Baker Street was a music shop run by a rotund gentleman with white hair called Horace Butler. My parents went there to buy me a guitar for my tenth birthday, plus The New Beatles Complete, a book that contained lyrics and guitar chords for songs recorded between 1967 and 1970: the soundtrack to my childhood.
Home was a three-bedroom semi a mile away from the tea shop. After a day in the bakehouse Peter’s routine was to ‘have a wash and a shave’ before disappearing into his office in the loft to do ‘the books’. The sound of Peter singing along to Edith Piaf’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien floats down the stairs. Regrets? No, I don’t think my father regretted being a baker and chocolatier.
THE RECIPES THAT FOLLOW are for the cakes and treats that I loved as a child – those that made the biggest impression on me during my formative years. And now, my own children enjoy them, too. Included is my favourite celebration cake, Peter’s pink cottage cake.
SPONGE FINGERS
Dad made sponge fingers, the perfect treat for toddlers, once a week. When stressed mums came into the shop with a child crying, Mum quickly handed out a sponge finger and the noise instantly stopped. The only downside was the trail of crumbs left behind. Sponge fingers were also used for charlotte russe, which was made to order, and homemade trifles, which we served with a cherry on top in a small silver-plated dish.
MAKES APPROXIMATELY 30
3 large eggs, separated
115g caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
85g plain flour
½ teaspoon cream of tartar
1–2 tablespoons granulated sugar