About the Bakery
Sara, along with her friend Katie, trained as a Bread Angel with Jane Mason of Virtuous Bread back in 2015 and has since completed a Five Day Intensive Bread course and further Croissant & Viennoiserie training with Richard Bertinet at his Cookery School in Bath.
‘We didn't plan to start a bakery, but with friends and neighbours asking us to bake for them regularly, we were only too happy to help.'
Within days of opening our Micro Bakery we had over thirty customers and are now baking a selection of loaves, buns, cakes and treats every Friday.
'Here we are now, many years later, still offering fresh, handmade bakes to our local community using organic flour and traditional recipes.'
We are members of the Real Bread Campaign and embrace their definition of Real Bread, as a result we source the best ingredients for the best bread choosing these options where possible:
Organic: The majority of our flour is organic, we also buy specialist local flours to support British farmers. Our butter is British organic as is our milk in the sweet enriched breads.
Wild: We use wild Brentford yeasts in our sourdoughs and choose fresh and/or specialist dried yeasts for our Artisan, Daily and Enriched bakes
Traditional Grains: Most of our flour is from Shipton Mill in Gloucestershire and, more recently, from our friends at Matthews Cotswold Flour.
Fair Trade: We choose Fair Trade sugar
Free Range: Our eggs are Free Range, often from the hens in the garden!
See How to order
If you have an allergy dietary requirements and would like us to exclude an ingredient from a recipe, please let us know...
UPDATE (September '24)
Who would have thought that our accidental bakery would have served so many customers over nearly a decade? I've just checked - It's 1,529 households! Running the bakery simply because local people wanted to buy my bread has been a real honour and we have really appreciated your support over the years.
Looking forward, a priority for Hen Corner is to encourage as many people as possible to live sustainably through our courses, events and writing. This sadly means that we will no longer be running the weekly bakery each Friday.
We do, however, plan to have special bake days in the run up to both Christmas and Easter, allowing you to order the unique products that we've created (that you just can't get anywhere else) like our award winning Apricot Couronne.
Other seasonal products that don't need to be baked to order, such as honey, preserves, eggs and those popular Christmas puddings will be available to order online as soon as they are ready.
