Being a keen baker while living in a small household can mean endlessly having too many baked goods to reasonably eat before they go off, or determinedly munching your way through seemingly endless cake long past its best. Sure, you can try and scale down the recipe, awkwardly attempting to use half an egg, forgetting half way through that you’re meant to be halving quantities (just me?) and ending up with a less than perfect bake. Edd Kimber, the original Bake Off champion, offers the perfect solution with his 2022 book Small Batch Bakes. Each recipe is designed for one to six people, meaning you’re more likely to be wanting more than throwing away stale bakes. This ingenious book covers pastry, cookies, cakes, desserts, and breads, meaning there’s bound to be something that takes your fancy every time the baking bug hits.
Kimber is keen that making small batches doesn’t mean lots of wasted ingredients. Often it feels like you can only buy ingredients in large quantities that don’t keep well, but he offers suggestions on how to cut down on this. He also signposts recipes that help use up ingredients, for example, for egg whites if you’ve only needed the yolks, a favourite inclusion for me as I find it so frustrating wasting these things. This is an incredibly well-thought out book which makes baking delicious treats a joy.
The recipes themselves are wonderful, whether its an Emergency Chocolate Chip Cookie for one (my first bake from the book), a cinnamon bun loaf cake, or sour cherry galettes, they are of the highest standard. I bought this book only a couple of months ago and have already used it far more than some other recipe books that have been sat on my bookshelf for much longer. The variety and originality of the recipes combined with all the hard work already having been done to scale them down makes this the perfect book for any keen baker, and because the portions are smaller you have a good excuse to bake even more. I’m completely obsessed, and can’t wait to get my hands on his latest offering - Small Batch Cookies.
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