Stray Cat Bakery

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.

08/04/2026

Sourdough in a bowl. This took longer than it looks.
Bibanesi. A Veneto thing. Long, thin, made with lard, sold in bags in every Italian supermarket since the 1950s.
I used sourdough starter instead of commercial yeast, extra virgin olive oil instead of lard, changed the size and left them to proof overnight.
The original is the original. This is mine.
Swipe to see what ended up on the table.

20/03/2026

Caramel does that when it is exactly hot enough to be dangerous.
Not warm. Not golden. The specific temperature where it moves like water, sets like glass and burns like nothing else in a domestic kitchen.
A croquembouche is just choux puffs and caramel. That sentence makes it sound manageable.
It is not manageable. It is a negotiation with hot sugar that you either win in four seconds or lose completely.

I won. Just about.