Swift - Primrose Bakery Everyday

WITH DELICIOUS RECIPES FOR EACH SEASON AND ALL OCCASIONS, THIS IS A BAKING BIBLE FOR ANY AND EVERY DAY

Primrose Bakery is renowned for easy, foolproof and delicious recipes. This book has over 100 of the very best new recipes from the bakery. It is for anyone who wants fun, great-tasting recipes which genuinely work.

Whether you want to bake a seasonal recipe, something for a special occasion, or something to suit that days mood, this one-stop baking bible has it all.

The Primrose Bakery was co-founded in the kitchens of Martha Swift and Lisa Thomas in 2004. In the last decade the bakery has gone from strength to strength, with the opening of two shops in Primrose Hill (2006) and Covent Garden (2008) and the publication of three recipe collections, Cupcakes From the Primrose Bakery, The Primrose Bakery Book and Primrose Bakery Celebrations. In October 2014 the bakery celebrated its 10th anniversary and the publication of a fourth cookery book, Primrose Bakery Christmas.

Martha Swift is now sole owner of the bakery and lives in Primrose Hill, north London, with her two daughters.

For Ray

Primrose Bakery Everyday is the bakerys fifth cookbook, all of them written since Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery was published in 2009. I hope that our loyal fans who have followed the growth of the bakery since its early days will find this new book as enjoyable and useful as the others and appreciate that they are all designed to complement each other. And if this is your first Primrose Bakery book, I hope you will enjoy the wide range of exciting and varied recipes as well as the snapshot of daily life at our two bakeries that it provides.

There are a few recipes which have been repeated from one book to the next and this is simply so that the reader has the complete recipe to hand without the need to check previous books. It also shows how easy it is to adapt and make minimal changes to a recipe and end up with something completely different.

It is always a pleasure to work on a new book as it gives all of us at the bakery an opportunity to come up with, and test new recipes. As with all the other Primrose Bakery books, I only include a recipe if I am confident and happy enough to sell the end product in my shops. We test every recipe thoroughly, taking into account the taste, look, ease of preparation and availability of ingredients. Having started the bakery as a home business, I want to ensure that all the recipes are easy to follow at home. All the recipes in our books are made and then sold at our two bakeries on a regular basis, whether it be every day, once a month or on certain occasions throughout the year. We only introduce a new recipe when we all feel it is good enough, and we are lucky to have many loyal customers to give us feedback and ideas.

I always recommend that you buy the best ingredients you can afford baking doesnt usually involve too many different ingredients, so if you can buy the best-quality ones, it makes a real difference. The key ingredients I would recommend spending a bit more money on, if possible, are free-range or organic eggs, a high-quality vanilla extract and unsalted butter. Before you start to prepare any of these recipes, it is usually beneficial to have all the ingredients at room temperature. So maybe just take the butter, eggs and milk out of the fridge while you get everything else ready. If you do want to invest in some specialist culinary equipment, I would suggest a sugar thermometer and a cooks blowtorch, both of which we use in some of our recipes. These are not absolutely essential, just something you may want to consider buying. A good electric hand mixer and a food processor, however, are pretty much indispensable for easy and enjoyable baking. We still rely heavily on both these items, as everything at the bakery is made and iced by hand. We go through an impressive amount of hand mixers, sometimes up to three a month, but couldnt manage without them as they always seem to give the best results, even when were baking huge quantities.

The last year at the bakery has been a busy one. We invested in our first delivery van, a very sweet, tiny Megavan, with our logo on the side, which not only allows us to deliver our cakes in and around London, but also to sell directly from it by opening it up at the side. We took the van to the Lovebox Festival in London in July 2014 and to several food events, such as Feast at Tobacco Dock in east London and the Street Dots food market in the City. It is always great to meet other food sellers and to take our cakes out and about. We also set up stalls at the Manchester Cake and Bake show in April 2014, at Taste of London in Regents Park in June 2014 and 2015, at Jamie Olivers Big Feastival in the Cotswolds in August 2014 and 2015, and at the BBC Good Food Bakes and Cakes show in north London in October 2014. There are some incredible small food producers and businesses in the UK right now and it is an honour to be part of this growing trend and to meet other like-minded and passionate business people. It is also lovely to get out and meet all of our amazing customers and fans and this is one of the reasons I love doing this job so much.

I am hoping to open a third Primrose Bakery in the near future, and perhaps a fourth, but need to be sure that the location is right and that at no time do we compromise on the quality of our cakes and our customer service. The bakery is only as good as the last cake that has gone out of the door and, while I cant imagine doing any other job, it is often challenging to make a small food business a success and to maintain that success. I want to be certain that all our cakes are of the highest quality at all times, both in taste and presentation, and this gets harder the bigger a business gets.

I have often said before how we all work together at the bakery as a team, with as many staff as wish to being involved in the books. To work with such a talented team of chefs and shop staff makes my job such a pleasure. Again, this book has been achieved with the invaluable help of the bakerys former head chef, Lisa Chan, and it is always inspiring to work with someone who has such a love of cooking and recipe development. The bakerys current head chef, Daniel, has also been very involved in the creation of new recipes and he leads a small but amazing team of pastry chefs in the two bakery kitchens. Our business manager, Sally, and her deputy, Rachel, are such key parts of the business that it is hard to imagine Primrose Bakery without them or, indeed, our former manager Faye and the other dedicated shop staff, including my eldest daughter, Daisy, who has been so fantastic both at working in the shop and helping me with the business.