Breaking bread with Boudicca at One Mile Bakery Exeter

Independent, Baking and Home are three words that I love. So when Boudicca from One Mile Bakery Exeter – with a name like that she’s already cool in my eyes – contacted me and asked me to come along to one of her family baking lessons, the answer was YES, YES, YES.

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while you’ll know that I like to champion the little guys, Boudicca is a small business owner and Mum of two. She runs her own bakery business in St. Thomas, where she offers courses and delivered baked goods up to one mile away (read more about that side of the business on my blog here).

This blog is all about her family baking lessons – I took my smallest along and we had a ball!

We park up and knock on the door of the terraced house in St Thomas, not entirely sure what to expect from a baking lesson in someone’s house.

Warm Welcome

Boudicca welcomes us warmly at the door and showed us into her lovely house. There are books galore, photos and kids art. It is welcoming, clean and tidy, a real a home from home. Bou offers us a drink and tells us what we will be doing during our lesson. We will be baking bread, scones and pizza, and eating the pizza for lunch – bonus!

We are shown to the kitchen and given aprons, it’s a sweet space, plenty big enough for two, four at a push. The ingredients and equipment are set up and ready to go

Baking bread

Could there be a more perfect activity for a child than making bread? Messy hands, squidgy dough, kneading. My little one is in her element! 

Boudicca talks us through the baking process, explaining why the yeast and the salt need to be kept separately (in case you don’t know – in direct contact, salt can kill the yeast, which will stop the dough from rising). 

After getting our hands thoroughly dirty, she shows us how to roll the bread into a bun roll ready for the oven and we decorate it with seeds (can you guess whose is whose?).

Scone Love

While we wait for the bread to bake, we have a quick scone making session, creating half a batch of Gruyère and black pepper scones (nom, nom, nom) and some regular ones. Smally had great fun creating the crumbs with the butter/flour combo and cutting the shapes with the colourful cutters.

All the ingredients are weighed up and ready to go, making it very easy for the lessons to flow and for my six-year-old not to have time to be distracted!

In the oven, they go and out they come.. Who knew making scones was SO easy? The smell of bread and scones baking fills my nostrils, and as the scones are cooling, I sneak into the kitchen and have a taste – delicious!

And the bread is ready, a tasty round of seeded buns, perfect of a family of bread lovers.

Getting our Italian on

With Italian blood running through the family, in our house, food is the pizza of choice so when Bou told us we were making pizza it was game on!

All my favourite ingredients are waiting on a chopping board – it’s like she’s a mind reader! There’s homemade tomato sauce, pesto, artichoke spread, olives, tomatoes, roasted peppers plus all the cheese (cheddar and mozzarella) – Bellissimo.

After making and rolling the dough, smallest played the game of ‘one on the pizza, one in the mouth’ with the olives and decided to go cheeseless with her pocket pizzas.

I, on the other hand, needed to put everything on my pizzas with a variety of sauces and cheeses too. Here are my little islands of pizza goodness, floating on a black sea of baking glory.

We devour them for lunch – we have certainly worked up and appetite and they were SO tasty!

What we thought

We were with Boudicca for four hours – which I think it’s a perfect amount of time for a session with kids. We came away excited to share our day and our food with the rest of the family.

Boudicca was great with my daughter, she was organised, knowledgable and the hours flew by liked minutes. For more, including; chats from my daughter and Boudicca plus some live footage from our day see my Instagram story.

I would definitely recommend this little course as a great family-bonding exercise to get stuck into over the holidays! We love One Mile Bakery Exeter and I’m planning a trip back with number one son.

*Disclaimer: In exchange for a review we had a free taster class.