A little bit of history…
My first successful independent bake was a swiss roll at my Home Ec class… I went on to do a bit of baking here and there while I trained as a doctor – I found lots of wonderful bakers working in the NHS and saw how much joy a home-baked cake could bring to a very stressful environment
When I qualified as a child and adolescent psychiatry consultant, I started work on an inpatient unit for adolescents where there was always a weekly ward round
It can be tough going for everyone involved… so I started to bring cakes in and before I knew it – I was baking every week. Here’s a photo of me as a bright-eyed bushy tailed new consultant more than 14 years ago!
I had already started to experiment with baking for colleagues with different dietary requirements and then something big happened….
My mum had a life-changing stroke…
And that made me look at my own lifestyle. Gradually I started to introduce more and more plant-based food into my life and it became obvious to me that my weekly baking needed to be vegan too
I can’t say my first attempts at vegan baking were great – there were many frustating evenings when cakes ended up in the bin
It took me a good couple of years to really get to grips with it properly and I started to develop my own recipes as I found that many vegan baking recipes were a bit sweet for my liking and small adjustments improved the texture. Plus I’m a great lover of a good fillings and toppings, but I found that the recipes for icing and creams didn’t really hit the spot
