Oh how I love this art of baking. I’ve been baking bread since I was about 13-14, when I started at school then made bread for my family every weekend until I got bored of it! Since then, there has always been baking of some sort in my life.

I was incredibly cynical about bread machines until I owned one, which was given to me by chance by recently-married friends who’d been given two as wedding gifts. They gave their spare one to us and I’ve never looked back. I know that many still see them as the work of the devil but they bring home baking back to busy people and since our first forays into bread machine bread, we have never bought bread of any description. We make everything from pitta, naan and focaccia, through to loaves for slicing with which to make sandwiches or toast. Often the breads are flavoured with other things – the toasted sandwiches we’ve just had for lunch were made with cheese, onion and thyme bread.

You see, what many people fail to recognise is that you don’t have to bung in your ingredients then go away for five hours returning to a baked loaf with no human intervention in-between, although we do that often, that’s by no means the extent of it.

These buns were made using a recipe from my school days, when I was a young whippersnapper in (the utterly terrifying) Miss James’s cookery class at Howard of Effingham School. I’ve just doubled up the quantities and shoved all of the ingredients except the fruit into the bread machine set on knead cycle. From then I left it, had dinner, came back to it 45 minutes later, added the fruit to the dough and rolled it into 16 golf ball sized buns. They got left in plastic tents (bin liners that were blown up and knotted) overnight and were cooked in just 10 minutes to provide us with hot, spicy, fruity buns that were as light as air and with a wonderful, lush flavour that can’t be replicated if you prove them quickly in an airing cupboard or such like. The remaining buns get frozen and are our weekend breakfast treats, thawed and toasted for the coming weeks.

You can’t beat slow rise. There is something magical that happens to the flavours in the bread that is indefinable but unmistakable. What’s most gratifying about it is that it would never have occurred to me had it not been for pizza pilgrims. I’ve always been a bit of a fan of the slow food movement but now I’m definitely a slow, slow, slow-slow, slow…never mind any quick-quick I’ve decided that’s just not for me!