It’s great to have this year’s courses well underway, this week we’ve been baking beautiful bread and making marvellous marmalade. Our course guests took home their wonderful creations and can enjoy a home-made breakfast or a sneaky supper, if they can’t wait that long to sample their goodies.
Keep it under your hat?
Well that’s where Paddington Bear used to keep his marmalade sandwiches, yet I’m sure that they made his hair very sticky. On our recent Toast and Marmalade course we were getting sticky hands kneading dough as we made our wonderful loaves of organic bread. Whilst it was wet and windy outside, it was warm and bright in the conservatory at Hen Corner and such a delight to spend the day with Justine, who discovered us in Out and About magazine, Jules, who blogs as Chiswick Mum, and Sean from Cultivate London. We nibbled on ginger oat cookies, mugs of coffee to hand, and dovetailed preserving and baking throughout most of the day. A homemade lunch of bread, soup, cheese and chutney was a welcome reward after a morning of chopping and kneading and an organic chocolate and chilli cake was enjoyed whilst the last loaves baked to perfection. There was lots of talk about making more marmalade at home over the weekend and baking more batches of bread, I do hope they all try it again!
Coming up at the Corner…
This year we have planned courses right throughout 2014 giving everyone the opportunity for ‘A little bit of country life in London’. Our next course, on Saturday 22nd February, is the first of our family sessions where children and their grown ups can hug a hen and consider if chicken keeping would work for them.
Family Feathers and Fun includes all the information of our Urban Hens course but also provides treats and craft activities for our younger guests.
Book of the Blog Post:
By Daniel Stevens
I’ve had this book for a while and it was so helpful to read again as a refresher before our course this week.
The book explains the hows and whys of bread making helping us start with a basic recipe and follows up with many variations equipping us to bake a different artisan loaf each week…
This book is available with many of our other favourites books from the Hen Corner Shop!
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Other News:
- We were thrilled that Country Living magazine featured our courses on their blog
- London blogger Chiswick Mum published a lovely interview with us
- More of Matilda’s pumpkins have been used to making winter warming soups
Jobs for next week:
- Give the fruit trees a winter wash and prune
- Put the finishing touches to our new website
- Try and build a shelter for our peach tree to protect from leaf curl
Have a good week yourself…
Join us on the Journey!
