Stray Cat Bakery

17/06/2026

Last-minute dinner. First thing they asked about was dessert.

I had forty minutes, a bowl of strawberries that needed using and mascarpone that had been sitting in the fridge waiting for a reason.
Strawberry tiramisù. Homemade sponge fingers, cold cream, fresh strawberries cut twenty minutes ago.
No coffee, no plan, no time to second-guess anything.

It is on the table tonight.
I photographed it before anyone could get to it.
Smart move.

16/06/2026

I wanted this to feel deep, dark and a little indulgent in the best possible way.
A sablé pastry rested overnight, a hazelnut and chocolate frangipane baked low and slow until the kitchen smells like something worth waiting for.
Then a dark chocolate ganache, poured while the tart is still cool.
Then a cremoso, made the day before and left to set slowly in the fridge.
This is the kind of tart that takes two days if you do it properly.
The kind that looks simple on the surface but has four layers of intention underneath.
Full recipe in the carousel.

09/06/2026

Breads of Italy · Vol. 1: Pane Carasau

Sardinia’s ancient flatbread, made in a kitchen in Staffordshire. The process is meditative: roll it impossibly thin, bake it until it puffs into a balloon, split the two layers apart, then bake again until it shatters at the slightest touch.

It’s called carta da musica, music paper, because of the sound it makes. I think you can hear it in the video.

This is the first in a series celebrating the extraordinary regional breads of Italy. Each one has a story, a technique, a reason it exists. I can’t wait to share them all.

Vol. 2 is already proving. Which bread do you think it is?

26/05/2026

Strawberry tiramisu as a cake.
Full recipe in the carousel.

I wanted this to feel soft, light and a little excessive in the best possible way.

Two savoiardo (ladyfinger) layers, strawberries left to sit until they made their own syrup, tiramisu mousse, Swiss meringue, Chantilly cream.
Every part made separately, then brought together slowly, one layer at a time.

This is the kind of cake that asks for patience while you are making it and disappears very quickly once it reaches the table.

The kind that looks delicate, but takes work.

Fresh strawberries, soft cream, a little crunch, and that quiet moment at the end when everything finally looks exactly the way you hoped it would.

Full recipe in the carousel.

20/05/2026

I did not plan to spend a Wednesday evening rolling grissini by hand.
Then I did. Every single one a different shape, a different thickness, a different idea about how long it wanted to be.
Raw on a tray, they looked like chaos.
Twenty minutes in the oven changed that entirely.
Standing in a glass on the table, they looked like they had always been exactly this.

The crunch on the last slide is not edited.
You cannot fake that sound.
Everyone said one.
Nobody stopped at one.

06/05/2026

This was not the plan.
The dough was supposed to be a grande lievitato. Second dough, butter added, gluten network collapsed the moment it went in. Two days of work sitting in a container going nowhere.
So I changed the destination.
Same dough, muffin tin, no guarantees. I had no idea if the oven would fix what the mixer could not.
It did.
Twelve cupcakes, twelve different buttercream patterns, not a single gram wasted.
The best things in this kitchen were never part of the original plan.

28/04/2026

Turn the sound on. That crunch is the only review that matters.

Baguettes. Proper ones. The kind where the crust shatters when you squeeze it and the inside is open and soft and completely different from what is outside.

Made in a home oven in Staffordshire with steam, cold dough and the kind of patience that makes you check the oven twice every ten minutes.
The UK does many things well. The baguette is not one of them.

So I made my own.

27/04/2026

22/04/2026

Nobody believes you can do this at home until you see it on a wire rack.
Croissants. Laminated dough, cold butter folded in layers, left to proof overnight and pulled out of a home oven in Staffordshire on a Wednesday morning.
No professional oven. No marble slab. No pastry school.
The layers are either there or they are not. There is no fixing it after the fact.
They were there.