Gloucestershire Archives

Autumn is Coming… And So Are My Bread Courses!

Discover all the new breadmaking courses from autumn 2024 to Christmas

The Annual Real Bread Week

Real Bread week – a celebration of good bread

Pumpkins Galore Gloucestershire

Bake pumpkin bread and scary fougasse or pick a pumpkin

Oldbury Tarts

A traditional Gloucestershire Recipe Do you make a traditional recipe from your locality? As a newcomer to Gloucestershire I really wasn’t aware of a particular recipe to make. There seemed …

How do you take your milk? In bottles or plastic cartons?

The milk vending machine in Ljubljana's market square

Plastic or Glass Bottles, or milk by vending machine? Reducing the amount of plastic I use is on my mind these days. Should I switch to milk in glass bottles? …

Baker Better Bread: Baking in the Rofco

Successfully baking bread in the Rofco oven Baking for yourself It’s quite a shock when you start baking bread for yourself. Justifying a bread oven when you’re not sure how …

Discover Gloucestershire Heritage Apples

How many apple varieties would you guess there are in Gloucestershire? Ten, twenty, 50? More than 100 apple varieties native to Gloucestershire have been documented: Eating apples, cooking apples and …

Award winning sloe gin recipe

A really delicious alcoholic drink that can be drunk neat or added to a cocktail, sloe gin is easy to make with fruits from the hedgerow

Let’s make sloe gin

Why make sloe gin? It is a gorgeous tipple. Drink a tot on its own or add to a cocktail. Make in early autumn so it’s ready for Christmas.

Its latin name is prunus spinosa which might give you a clue to its spiky nature. Do go armed with gloves! Look for the blackberry bushes and if you’re lucky you’ll find the sloe bushes also known as blackthorn. They can grow up to 6 or 7 metres high and live for 100 years! But the ones round here are much smaller. The fruits are mostly similar in size to a blueberry although I did find some woppers this year.

Capreolus Distillery – Prepare to be amazed

Barney working with the still at Caproulus Distillery

Spirit of the Year 2016

Drive down an ordinary road in Cirencester, park and walk down the path to Capreolus distillery (Capreolus is the latin name for a roe deer). To one side is the area where the ingredients are processed. On the other side is the distillery itself. It’s housed in the lean-to greenhouse of Barney Wilczak’s childhood home. The garage is now designated a bonded warehouse – there can’t be many of those in Gloucestershire.

Escape to Thailand at Thaikun

Last week I ate in Bangkok. Bath masquerading Bangkok to be exact. It was a chilly evening when my husband and I walked into Thaikhun. There was an immediate assault on the senses: colour, noise, people and stuff. Look up and there are all sorts of items hanging from the ceiling including signs in a language we didn’t know, household utensils, some very old TVs, networks of wires wrapped round what looked like telegraph poles. We then noticed the bar to the left where much energetic shaking was going on and to the right a very shiny kitchen semi-open to diners. The space is large but cleverly split into different areas.