A Short Note on Equipment and Ingredients

You need neither a professionally appointed kitchen nor an expensively stocked larder to bake. Your hands, a bowl and a wooden spoon should see you through most of it, along with a couple of sandwich tins, one or two Springform tins, a loaf tin, a muffin-tray, a pie and flan dish and a rolling pin. A food processor makes life easier for some jobs, but is hardly indispensable. If there is one piece of machinery that does make a baking life more pleasurable, it’s a free-standing mixer; I now couldn’t live without my KitchenAid mixer, or certainly wouldn’t want to. The dough hook makes bread-making a far lighter task (though I would never suggest you give up completely the relaxing routine of kneading by hand), and the other attachments – paddle and whisk – mean that you can let the cake batter be mixed or egg whites whipped while you get on with other things. Unlike a processor, you don’t feel excluded from the job at hand; it’s thus a very good way of feeling that you’re doing it all yourself but with the minimum of effort. Otherwise, a simple hand-held electric mixer is a cheaper alternative. And I cannot do any cooking without a Magiwhisk, sold at any of the below.