Welcome to Spoon in the Nutella, a blog in which I hope to share my culinary exploits great and small, successes and failures. There shall be no shame in this exploratory food space; all posts will be horrifically honest and accompanied by my less than expert photography.

I’m Beth, a recent graduate with a lot of time on my hands and a lot of love for baking. The title of this blog is not, as may first appear, an instruction in order to improve a lacklustre chocolate cake recipe. Nor is it the confession of a sneaky Nutella thief — I must admit the whole chocolate on bread thing always slightly disturbed me. It is in actual fact an event which usually causes me to bake. To explain; my mother is in possession of an incredibly sweet tooth and if there so happens to be no delicious goods in the house she can be known to, not so subtly, wander over to the jam cupboard and surreptitiously procure a spoonful of the good stuff ( I cannot confirm if double dipping takes place, the event is too speedy).
Whilst this behaviour is probably extremely normal for most people, when I bear witness to it I get an increasing feeling of sadness that this is where she is getting her sweet kicks when I know something infinitely better (no offence Nutella) could be thrown together in a couple of hours. Yes, Nutella is an instant hit of chocolatey goodness but really, is there anything better than something freshly baked?

My mother’s chocolate habit is not the only reason for my baking habit. I love to bake but that love has only been allowed to develop because of my mother. All my life, we have always had a ‘baking cupboard’ and a ‘cooking chocolate drawer’ in the kitchen. Baking never had to be planned and shopped for in my house but could be done as desired, and with a talented mum and 5 other sisters under the same roof this happened rather a lot.

My weapon of choice to help me along this blogging adventure is the big ‘ol beast of kitchens, the 4 oven AGA.

Drying washing - amongst its many talents

In its full glory

Whilst an AGA does magically make all food taste that bit better - once you’ve had AGA toast you can’t go back - it also forces you (well it does me) to research and cross compare recipes. With 4 ovens of differing temperatures the AGA does not completely adhere to the conventional gas mark/°Celsius cooking instructions; sometimes I do just shove a cake ‘somewhere’ in the baking oven and simply hope that something edible will eventually come out. Looking at a ‘normal’ recipe and then frantically trying to find out if Mary Berry - the Queen of AGA cooking - has made something similar and what rung she cooks it at has made me rather obsessive about recipes in general. I now cannot just find, for example, a shortbread recipe and go on and bake it. I have to research many other shortbread recipes and see how and why they differ and then test them all out or create a hybrid version. It is here that I would like this blog to intersect with my frankly anal attitude to baking, it shall be a space for me to explore and test a variety of recipes and document my findings. Hopefully, it will also force me to try new things, I must admit that I have rather shied away from all things pastry, bread and custard based so clearly tackling them in a very public space is the logical conclusion.

Oh, I will document savoury cooking too sometimes - can’t have cake for dinner everyday!

Where to start...