Get Baked

Few of us in the baking world could have missed the meteoric rise of Rich Myers and Get Baked. I’m not going to call it an overnight success, because I’m sure a lot of long, hard days were put in before the success kicked in. But from what I saw online, Rich, an incredibly talented baker, took control of his social media presence like very few can. He used it to leverage situations such as being banned from using illegal sprinkles because they had banned e-numbers, to making one of THE most iconic chocolate cake of all time – Bertha, formerly known as Bruce.

Get Baked is now a cult movement Bakery. It’s gone from disgruntled customers always crying that Bruce was out of stock, to becoming one of the busiest and biggest ‘small’ bakeries in the UK. And what they have in balls and brashness, they equal in quality and consistency.

Get Baked – the book

So, of course, I had to buy the book and see if I could reproduce a few of the recipes for myself. The book is as bright and vivacious as the social media presence, with modern photography that does nothing to give any hints of cute or rustic. It is 144 pages of an assault to the eyes. It’s colourful and bold. The photography is brightly lit with sharp contrasting shadows. The Get Baked branding is strong. The bakes are all things you really want to eat!

The book is divided into 6 sections – Chocolate, Nuts, Fruit, Spice, Sugar and Bruce. With a selection of bakes in each section. The recipes are the Get Baked signature bakes you want to be convinced you can recreate. It contains recipes for pies, cookies, brownies, truffles, and of course Bruce. Each recipe starts with a bit of blurb from Rich, who has successfully injected some of his personality and dry sense of humour into every page.

The Recipes

I decided to try a couple of the cookie recipes. I did think about making Bruce, but I didn’t really know what I would do with over 4kg of cake, filled with 6kg of ganache – maybe if I have a special, large occasion coming up, I’ll give it a go.

The recipes I tried were Raspberry-Glazed Donut Cookies and Carrot Cake Cookies. Every recipe has a photo, and every recipe has well written instructions that are never scrimped on. Recipes often flow over 3 or 4 pages. This book is written to be followed, not just to look good with all the instructions on just 1 page for ease of printing.

The recipes use readily available ingredients. There is no hunting or trying to find quirky ingredients to make these recipes. Most are from good, store cupboard ingredients, with a few extra bits you can pick up from the supermarket.

When making the raspberry-glazed donut cookies I was surprised by the use of ‘raspberry flavouring’. How refreshing that a cookbook writer acknowledges that you may not want to go through a 10 step process to make raspberry glaze, and adding a bit of flavouring is the quickest option. I actually didn’t have raspberry flavouring, so I used a strawberry flavouring instead – still tasted great!

The recipes I tried

So, onto the recipes I tried. Both were cookies so had the same base ingredients. What I found interesting was using a mix of strong bread flour and plain (all-purpose) flour. It resulted in a lovely cookie texture with a great chewy quality. It’s something I may do more often when baking cookies.

The method was clearly written. I particularly liked the part about chilling the cookies. I often find some recipe books don’t emphasise this step enough. I also liked the description of how to tell if your cookies are done ‘If they’re still bulging in the centre, then they’re not yet ready.’ You know where you are with instructions like that!

My one criticism was the quantity of salt. I understand my palette may differ from others, but I felt a whole teaspoon of salt for the size of the recipe was just too salty. I made the Glazed Donus Cookies first and reduced the salt content to half a teaspoon when I made the Carrot Cake Cookie.

I didn’t make the same glaze as was in the recipe for the Carrot Cake Cookies. There was no other reason than I was planning on selling these in The Cake Shed, and the UK was predicted a heatwave. The glaze was meant to be cream cheese, which to be honest sounds incredible. But with temperature about to hit over 30°c in the shade, I didn’t want the possibility of cheese going manky on my cookies. I instead made the same glaze as the Glazed Donut Cookies but added orange flavouring instead.

Would I make more from the book?

I really enjoyed this book and will definitely make other recipes from it. I look forward to a day where I have enough friends over that I can make a 10kg Bruce. I’m also looking forward to having a go at some of the pie recipes. Pies aren’t really a big thing in my kitchen, but the Strawberry Limeade Pie is living rent free in my head at the moment and needs to be made soon!

Get Baked by Rich Myers
White Lion Publishing
Hardback. RRP £14.99

I have owned this book since 2023, when it was first published. However, until deciding to do this book review I hadn’t made any recipes from it. Doing this review has made me understand why exactly that was. But more on that later.

Clare Ptak, was already a successful baker and cookbook author before she was thrust higher into the limelight by making the wedding cake for the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk. It was such a modern wedding cake, that it got the publics interest in a way I had never seen a Royal wedding cake ever do before.

Clare Ptak is originally from California, but has set up home and business in Dalston in London’s East End. Her bakery-cafe, Violet Bakery, is renowned for it’s delicate cakes and seasonal flavours.

I was eager to buy this book when it was first released. I think I was firstly seduced by the wonderful name: Love is a Pink Cake. But also by the reputation Clare has for making unusual flavoured bakes. The look and feel of the book is everything you expect it to be.

It is a large hardback with over 250 pages. The content is a mix of narrative from Clare on her life and story, and delicious looking and sounding cakes and bakes. The book is split into 2 sections. The first from her home in California, and the second from England. Each section is then broken down into bakes for Mornings, Afternoon, After Meals, Party Time and Holiday Treats. It is clear that every recipe is wrapped with an experience or memory that makes them easy to love.

The photography is a combination of candid photos of Clare and her family and friends, and deliciously styled cakes and bakes. The recipe styling is muted, rustic and you can believe they were all baked and taken in a home kitchen. There is genuinely not one photograph that I wouldn’t like to reach into and try what’s on the table.

But with all that you’d expect that I would have made one of the recipes sooner. But here is the problem for me. Every single recipe I went to make had an ingredient that wasn’t in my store cupboard. And for me, someone that likes a faff free baking life, that seemed a little too much like hard work.

It wasn’t that the ingredients are hard to get hold of. It’s just many I would probably never use again and I didn’t want to have them wasting in my cupboard.

The ingredient lists also seem longer than needed. As an example I made the Blonde Peanut Butter Cookies recipe. It involved 2 types of flour, one of them being wholemeal. I don’t have wholemeal flour in my cupboard, and to purchase a whole bag to use 75gms seemed a waste. I used a mix of white and strong white instead.

Some recipes also have ingredients that could appear out of place, with no explanation for their presence. For example I made the English Angel Cake. The buttercream called for a quarter of a teaspoon of apple cider or white wine vinegar. There was no explanation why I should be putting vinegar into my buttercream. For someone without the baking knowledge I have this may seem very odd. Again, I didn’t have either vinegars so I adapted the recipe to be more suitable by reducing the sweetness in the recipe by reducing the sugar. It was a very sugar heavy buttercream recipe.

The recipes are well presented. The instructions are very easy to follow, if sometimes a little long winded. I understand when making complex pastries and patisserie that instruction can become quite complicated. But I read and reread the process for the Angel Cake many times before I realised it was just a case of splitting the mix in half to add 2 different colours. The recipes I made came out exactly how I would expect them too, which was reassuring.

The book is filled with warmth and stories, showing the love Clare has for her craft and the places she calls home. If you enjoy a lengthy, in depth baking process then this book is perfect for you. But if you want a simpler type of bake, then maybe this isn’t.

Love is a Pink Cake by Clare Ptak

Published by Square Peg

Hardback. RRP £27

So, a couple of weeks ago I started an egg experiment. Last year I had seen on Instagram a man called Gavin Wren say how buying large eggs wasn’t worth it, because the useful part of an egg doesn’t differ that much in size from medium eggs to large eggs.

I had always been a large egg purchaser, but this got me interested. I was influenced straight away and actually swapped to buying medium eggs. Well, they were cheaper, so why not?

But then, I thought, was he actually correct? Or was I influenced under dodgy information. To be honest my baking hadn’t suffered in any way. In fact my bank balance had been grateful. But was he right? So I set up my own, very unscientific, but what I think, useful experiment to see if he was right.

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The Eggsperiment conditions *still chuckling*

I’m going to admit, straight off the bat, my sample of eggs wasn’t large. I purchased 12 medium and 12 large eggs from the same store, My eggs, for what it’s worth, all had brown shells. I got weighing. In the UK the weight of eggs is what rates the size of an egg. Medium eggs weigh between 53 and 62gms, whereas large eggs weigh 63 to 72gms.

I weighed all my eggs, and found this to be the case. Great, the supermarkets aren’t ripping me off. I then, as I used each one, weighed the useful part of the egg once they were cracked and out of their shells. And because I’m not really that great with lots of numbers (they kind of bamboozle my brain) I decided to add them all up and get the averages. So I had an average for both medium and large eggs in their shells, and medium and large eggs out of their shells.

Egg Shell Weight

I found that the shell was, in relative terms, about the same percentage of the total weight for both medium and large eggs. Which, to be honest goes without saying - bigger egg, bigger shell to cover it. The shell of my medium eggs was 13% of the overall weight, and 14% of the overall weight of the large egg.

But more interestingly, what this meant was the actual egg inside didn’t have the same 10gm gap as the medium and large rating suggested they might have (I know they could have from a 1gm to 20gm difference because that’s a tolerance. But I’m talking averages!). On average there was just 5.5gms difference between the inside of a medium egg and the inside of a large egg.

JUST 5.5gms difference on average!!

But what is the cost saving of using medium eggs?

But, what does this mean? Firstly, let’s look at cost.

If I was, for example, making a cake with 4 eggs in the recipe, depending on where I buy my eggs, I could save around 15p - 18p per recipe. I would be about 22gms down in weight, but that’s pretty easy to rectify with a tablespoon of milk, which is closest to the egg in composition - it being protein, fat and moisture. At a cost of less than 1p.

If I made a lot of cakes, like I do for business, this saving will very soon start to add up.

But what if I made my cakes using the egg weighing method, which for many cakes I do?

The egg weighing method is where the other ingredients in your cake all rely on the weight of the eggs that you start with. Whereby giving you the perfect, equally balanced ingredient measurements.

I calculated for every 10 egg mix you would be a whole egg weight down when using medium eggs. Therefore, for ever 10 large eggs, you would need to use 11 medium eggs to get the same sized cake. Surely that would work out more expensive?

Well, actually no. 11 medium eggs is still 13-15p cheaper than 10 large eggs.

So, medium eggs, work out cheaper no matter which recipe method you use!

What other implications are there for using medium eggs?

When I first announced I was doing this experiment on my social media I got a few DMs highlighting the animal welfare issues. So I looked briefly into this as extra information.

I found a fascinating article on the BBC about egg size and hen welfare. If you’re interested it’s definitely worth a read.

What I found was actually very obvious. But alarmingly I had just never thought about it before.

It is more stressful for a hen to lay a large egg than a medium. It’s the same for any animal. Think about it, if your friend says her baby was 10lb plus when born you wince a little in sympathy for her. If she says it was a healthy 6lb that’s a little more settling. Humans don’t give birth every day in the same way hens do. So constantly giving birth to, or laying, larger eggs is going to be much more stressful for the hens.

And it seems it’s not just nature whether they lay medium or large eggs. There are ways of inducing hens to lay larger eggs.

So, buying medium eggs is better for animal welfare. Medium egg laying hens are generally in better health.

Medium Eggs all the way

So to summarise medium eggs aren’t that much different in weight, will save you money, and will be better for the hens.

I think that’s what you call a win, win, win!

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This is the first time I have written a cookbook review for the Baker’s Bulletin. I have many, many cookbooks on my shelf and I hope to bring you more reviews in the future.

I love a cookbook written by an independent creator or bakery. Cookbooks written by people who bake for a living every day speak to my very core. Because I identify with those people, and I know that the recipes they write in their books come from the heart. And I want to support that.

This book is from Coinneach Macleod, otherwise known online as The Hebridean Baker. I bought this book when we were on holiday in the Hebrides. The Highlands and Hebrides are my favourite places in the UK, possibly the world. They can be calm and peaceful one day, and bleak and wild the next. Holidaying in the Hebrides is exhilarating, so I can only imagine what living on a Hebridean Island would be like.

The Hebridean Baker at Home follows Coinneach as he travels around the Islands meeting locals, hearing their tales, and learning their recipes. The tag line on the cover states ‘Flavours and Folklore from the Scottish Islands’, and that’s exactly what you get.

It is a book of variety with more than just a few recipes to look through. There are pages of chats with friends and family. They include scripts of songs sung in Gaelic, and insights of what life is really like on the Islands.

The book is homely and comforting. And whilst it’s not groundbreaking in any way it is a pleasure to flip through as it gives you a real feeling of getting a taste of someone else’s life that they enjoy. The recipes are comforting and the photography feels like they are genuinely taken inside a Coinneach’s own kitchen in his croft. There are hints of tartan and weathered wood, amongst mismatched rustic ceramics

Many of the recipes are borrowed and adapted from his friends who feature in the book and are presented with a tale to back up the origin or flavours. All have a purpose within the pages; none feel out of place.

Each recipe is presented as a spread – a photo on one page and the written recipe on the facing page, so you are never left guessing what your final dish should look like.

The ingredients are listed in both grams and ounces, with easy to follow, basic instructions. The equipment you need is found within the written instructions and not listed separately. I actually found some of the instructions a little too basic, and at times even vague. I tried 3 of the recipes from this book. One of my attempts I well and truly mucked up.

I made the Hygge Cake, or Danish Dream Cake. It’s a light vanilla cake with a butterscotch coconut topping. On the page it looked fantastic (and I don’t really like coconut!). However, the recipe had an instruction about placing the topping on the cake when it was ‘nearly baked’. Unfortunately, my cake wasn’t nearly baked enough and the topping just sunk straight through the centre. As I have experience and baking knowledge I re-baked the cake with some adjustment – see tomorrows recipe. But had I been a novice I may have been disappointed with the outcome.

To be honest, the cake still tasted delicious, it just wasn’t a looker in any way, shape or form. But with a dollop of custard on top it was still wonderful to eat.

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The other 2 recipes I baked; Raspberry Ripple Cookies, and Marmalade Shortbread were very successful, easy to follow and delicious to eat. If I remake them in the future I would make adaptations, but that isn’t to say they weren’t wonderful recipes.

If you have an interest in Celtic recipes or love the Scottish Islands this book is a great read. Whilst none of the recipes are revolutionary, they are both comforting and delicious. January is a good time to be browsing through this book if you’re looking for some home-baked comfort food. I’m sure I will try many more recipes.

The Hebridean Baker at Home by Coinneach Macleod

Published by Black and White Publishing

Hardback. RRP £26.