'Bread Making' by Ruth Clemens

I can bake cakes, and even the odd sourdough loaf, but when it comes to using yeast I am a complete novice. I felt I needed encouragement and so I was truly excited to learn that Ruth Clemens has added another volume to her ‘Pink Whisk Guide’ series, this time it’s Bread Making.

As with her ‘Guide to Cake Making’, these yeast recipes are so clearly set out, each step accompanied by colour photographs, and she has also added oodles of tips throughout. 

I couldn’t wait to bake and decided upon making some tasty-looking Iced Lemon Fingers. The ingredients were mainly already in my store-cupboard and I had only to buy some fast action yeast.

Ruth has the clever knack of breaking-down the instructions into simple stages and I found the dough easy to prepare – although I did take the angst out of kneading it by hand by using my trusty stand-mixer. The dough rose beautifully, in the time Ruth said it would, and the only hiccup after that was my clumsiness with the shaping of the fingers, as mine when completed didn’t look quite like Ruth’s neat row of dough sausages.

However, after the second rise, baking, cooling and icing, I was so very pleased with the result - not so perfectly uniform in shape but the texture and taste were great! Thanks to Ruth and her clever, simple, but effective recipe this ‘yeast-baking novice’ had produced a bun which wouldn’t have looked out of place in any baker’s shop. Of course, I have now been inspired to have a go at all manner of other breads – so watch this space!

There may be a plethora of home-bread baking books on the market already but ‘The Pink Whisk Guide to Bread Making’ by Great British Bake Off finalist, Ruth Clemens, is the one that I would thoroughly recommend as an essential for your cookery book shelf.

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This hardback is published by David & Charles and is priced at £12.99.