Celebrated baker Michael James and his wife Pippa James believe that food has the power to connect us with people, place and planet. That ethos is front and centre in their new cooking class and food consultancy venture, Urbanstead, and it also shines through in their third cookbook together, Sweet Seasons.
Featuring more than 80 delicious recipes, from retro hits to modern marvels, Sweet Seasons is full with essential sweet things, from wholegrain pastries and classic cakes to tarts, puddings, biscuits, brownies and more.
Here’s how to get the most out of it, according to the Family James.
If this is your first time getting into baking you might like to try…
Pippa: A simple cake – the whole-wheat chocolate cake or spelt and orange cake would be my picks. You can’t not get excited about the transformation of simple ingredients, and who doesn’t love to eat cake?
The easiest recipe in the book is…
Michael: The Cornish heavy cake. This is the cake that Cornish fishermen’s wives would make to celebrate the safe return of their husbands from sea. It’s basically a giant scone, mixed by hand and pulled together on a tray, rich with lard and studded with currants. A lattice pattern was traditionally scored onto the top to symbolise a fishing net, offering luck for the next voyage.
And if you feel like a challenge, you might try…
Michael: Tiramisu from scratch. We make the sponge finger biscuits and mascarpone, and there are a few different techniques to play with. Nothing is overly difficult, but it does require planning and time. The results are totally worth it though.
The main thing we learned writing it was…
Pippa: I learned (again) a lesson I will never tire of learning: the power of community. Our neighbours offered fruit and herbs from their gardens while we were testing recipes, and some tested recipes themselves. At the end of each day during the photoshoot, we invited neighbours over to pick up left-over food. We had a procession of people turn up at the door, armed with Tupperware. It created this shared joy and excitement for the project and was just a lovely way to connect with people.
Something that might surprise you about baking at home is…
Michael: The process can be the best part of home baking. Even if it doesn’t work out like you expect, you’ll still usually achieve something delicious.
There’s a sustainability angle to this book. In practical terms, that means…
Pippa: Food is one of the most powerful levers that everyone can pull, in terms of impact. We try to communicate that you have power to make positive change by choosing to eat local, seasonal food, using less processed sugars and more whole grains. But you can simplify it even further: learning to cook allows you to bypass the industrial food complex which is one of the most destructive industries on the planet. And it’s fun!
There’s also more to the new book than pastry. You might also like to try…
Pippa: We actually have a few non-bakes in this book. Lemon posset is a simple, set lemon cream that is so delicious. There’s also a feijoa mousse and rice pudding, and the simplest muesli bars that are set in the pan. They can be made quickly on Sunday night, ready to slice for the lunch box on Monday morning. Snacks for the week sorted.
The books we refer to most often when we’re cooking in our own kitchen are…
Michael: I like to dip into our library of cookbooks for inspiration and to learn about techniques. I always return to Tartine by Elisabeth Prueitt, Sweet by Helen Goh and Yotam Ottolenghi, The Handmade Loaf by Dan Lepard and Advanced Bread and Pastry by Michel Suas. I also love Bread, Cake, Doughnut, Pudding by Justin Gellatly and the two St John books. Our daughter teases me because I have four copies of White Heat by Marco Pierre White, which I read for the stories of those crazy kitchens. So hard to narrow it down.
Pippa: I love Simple Chinese Cooking Class by Kylie Kwong, all the Cornersmith books, and of course Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion. I also often cook from our first two books: The Tivoli Road Baker and All Day Baking.
If there’s one thing we’d like you to understand about baking at home, it’s…
Michael: Read the recipe from start to finish, and gather your ingredients before you even break an egg. Embrace your mistakes and make notes of how the recipe goes to refer to next time.
And if you could take one thing away from reading Sweet Seasons, we hope…
Michael: That you build confidence to adapt recipes to what you have, rather than racing around in pursuit of an exhaustive ingredient list.
Pippa: That we prompt you to think about who’s growing your food and how you’re using it for good.
Sweet Seasons (Hardie Grant, RRP $50) is out now and available from excellent independent bookstores, such as Paperback Bookshop, Readings and Hill of Content.