A few photos from our weekend in Caernarfon.
It was a weekend of experimentation, six bakers trying things out and, more often than not, saying it wasn’t quite right.
And the first shall be last: Stig did a rescue job on a couple of barms, one beer, one from the dregs of Jay’s most excellent cider + some pot barley cooked in beer I just happened to have in the freezer. She mixed them on Friday night. Saturday morning they looked sad but she did several builds and they were finally baked and looking splendid Sunday afternoon before we left.
Where would we be without Jack’s sweet doughs: Pain aux raisins.
Joe declared his orange ring not as good as it looked. He was trying to recreate a Spanish recipe from memory with some leftover sponge. Work in progress.
Jay was trying to usurp Big G’s Marmite crown but it came out a bit fierce even for us lovers of the black ooze. On the other hand he produced a delicious marmalade loaf.
Marcus experimented with a lardy cake using solid coconut oil in place of lard. Well, anything is worth a try – its most spectacular point was the amount of black smoke it produced in the oven. That’s when we noticed we had placed the oven directly under the smoke alarm! He made up for it with an excellent version of his famous Red Onion & Dark Wheat Beer Bread substituting cheese for the onion.
I was into torpedos. The first, a Polish dough, Placek, is destined to be turned into bread & butter pudding by Gert later in the week.
The second, a raisin stick flavoured with cumin, caraway and orange zest adapted from a formula in the Bread Bakers Guild of America’ quarterly magazine, was more successful. Needs a little more work.
It gets brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with flaked salt before being baked. Gert came up with black salt which is a new one on me but it looked pretty good.
Having a small group working and staying in the same B&B was really successful and Gert’s fabulous food was a considerable bonus. We are slowly putting together an overall blog to cover all the Bethesdabakin’ events so I hope we can put together a longer record with other bakers contributions and photos, maybe recipes in the near future.
Marcus’ account http://blog.bakers-row.com/2014/03/north-wales-bread-weekender/
The PArtisan Baker 
Thank you Mick for organizing this gathering I enjoyed spending time with everyone again. All the travel would have been worth it just to meet Gert and sample his culinary skills. Gert’s cooking has fired my imagination and he was kind enough to share his recipe ideas and inspirations with me.
Getting together with other enthusiasts to bake together is a very valuable experience. I think your post here reflects one of the important elements of these sessions. Having an environment where people feel comfortable to experiment with things that are new to them. Where they can follow their own idea or ask around for suggestions on how to create the result they are looking for.
Just to say I totally echo Joe’s remarks on how meeting like this together is indeed a great (and safe) place to experiment and share knowledge, without any nasty pressure to perform. Roll on the next event!