Baking Day

I have never been a baker. And with the added necessity of having to bake gluten free I have hardly dared even try.
I can create tarts with shop bought pastry and can just about manage cup cakes, brownies and pancakes.
But it's a fairly limited repertoire!
I decided it was time to try and improve myself and signed up for a gluten free baking course - bread and pastry.
Not only do I want to learn to bake I want to be able to teach Miss L so she is not stuck with overpriced, tasteless, over processed, inferior crap.
Mr K decided to come along too! The couple who bake together.....
..... will grow fat together!!!
We had an early and hectic start, having to get my car in for new brakes and tyres at the garage in Milton Keynes for 8.15am before getting the Little Misses to school so we could get to Bay Tree Cottage for our day of baking. But we made it!
There were four other women, me and Mr K and it was a lovely informal setting - in the owner's gorgeous kitchen!
The tutor was a woman whose daughter was diagnosed with Coeliac Disease at two and she has perfected recipes for her and written a book.
We made a bread first of all  - loaves and baguettes. You'd never mistake it for "normal" bread but it tasted really good, had a great texture - quite briochey (if that's a word!!!) and wasn't like eating a mouthful of sand!
Then it was pastry. It involved some weird techniques - scraping the dough in small sections with a palette knife against the board, dropping it from a height rather than kneading it - but the end results were spectacular. We made roasted vegetable quiche and gorgeous little plum and frangipani mini tartlets (a ball of pastry flattened into a mini muffin tray with a dobber. Genius!)
We were shown how to make an amazing dough which made the most delicious - and completely undetectable as gluten free - focaccia and pizza. And apparently can also be used to make pitta breads, bread sticks and even be watered down to make batter for fish and chips!!
So easy - bung in all the ingredients in one go and mix. Brilliant!
I can't wait to try it.
The day was a bit more chaotic than I was expecting, timings being off meant we didn't get to make the focaccia ourselves; lunch was late, there wasn't enough equipment for us all to use and it was stressful getting behind while waiting for scales etc, and we had to do an awful lot of washing up and tidying! But it was a brilliant day and will transform our ability to cook for - and with - Miss L.
I suspect it will also transform our waistlines. And not for the better!
We went to get collect my car via Lakeland and John Lewis to pick up some new essentials: a palette knife, a mini morsel tray (for the hundreds of tartlets we'll be making!) baking paper, and finally my much needed spatula. We had a quick coffee, rushed to get the car, rushed to school for the Little Misses, rushed home and ate our body weight in bread and pastry.