Stephen Jardine: Mix with the kids – home baking

WE used to be a nation that baked. Our national sweet tooth was the result of drop scones, cakes and biscuits lovingly made at home.

My mum’s handwritten recipe book is sparse in terms of salad ideas, but crammed full with variations on favourite sweet treats.

As society changed, and women spent more time out of the house, home baking seemed to face a bleak future – but that’s all changed in the last 18 months.

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New research shows youngsters aged 16 to 24 now spend as much time baking as the older generation. Add in a recessionary zeal for making things at home and saving money and you have the makings of the great baking revival.

“Baking is the new rock’n’roll”, says cookery writer Sue Lawrence. “People like Nigella Lawson and Lorraine Pascale have helped by taking baking out of the old world of Women’s Institute and making it young, funky and gorgeous”, Sue says.

The proof of it’s popularity can be seen in Scotland this weekend. Scottish Food and Drink Fortnight gets underway today with a range of events across the country including the Dundee Flower and Food Festival.

Stars of the show will be “The Fabulous Baker Brothers” Tom and Henry Herbert and “The Great British Bake Off’ judge, Mary Berry.

That competition has probably done more than anything else to put home baking back on the map. In the current series, several finalists in are in their twenties. One of them is James Morton from Shetland who also represents another change.

While men still dominate restaurant kitchens, when it comes to baking, traditionally women ruled supreme. The argument was that men cook by instinct not recipes and in baking that usually leads to disaster.

Twenty-one year-old James challenges that stereotype. He learned to bake with his granny and is now studying medicine at Glasgow University but he’s clearly never read the book that says men can’t bake. Instead he believes the precision of baking is the perfect opportunity to marry science with nurture.

Unlike cooking which is often a solitary business, baking is intensely social. When someone offers to help with the cooking, it rarely ends well. But from youngsters licking the bowl to letting your artistic aunt handle the icing, baking is most fun when others are involved.

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Thanks to social media, clandestine cake clubs now exist in Dundee, Argyll and Falkirk and Edinburgh and Glasgow also have dedicated baking groups.

So for lovers of Coconut Ice or the Ecclefechan Tart , the good news is that baking is back.

Young or old, male or female, you really can have your cake and eat it.

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