It’s quickly becoming festive around the neighbourhood, and our thinking has moved to Christmas and when we’ll be open over the festive period. With our Covid-safe procedures in place, we’re going to stay with our current opening days of Thursday and Saturday for now, and initially into the new year. We’ve been blown away with the support and enthusiasm of our customers. Thank you. We realise that at times the queue can be quite long, and so to help with this, we’ve introduced an online ordering service for our Christmas Eve shop. The Click & Collect service should enable us to take orders for the Christmas Eve bake outside the time we’re open, and thus speed up the queuing on other bake days. In addition it should also mean we can hopefully limit the time spent in the queue on Christmas Eve, and maximise the time you can spend with your families that day.

So visit our Buy Bread section of the website and put in your order for the Christmas Eve bake.

Thank you to those of you have been buying flour over the last month or so, and for those who came down to the Bakehouse on Friday to buy bread. After a successful trial bake on Friday morning, we’ve decided to return with a two bake week. It’s still not the case that we’re back to normal, but we will be able to have most of the breads we normally bake. In order to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our team, two of us will be baking on Thursday and Saturday mornings; with bread available from 10-1pm after everything is prepared for serving our customers. 

We’ll still be selling flour though, so come down on Thursday or Saturday mornings to  restock your flour supplies. We’ve loved seeing so many of you baking whilst we’ve been closed, and want to encourage you to continue to do so. 

As you know, due to the Covid-19 crisis, all of our usual operations are suspended to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our volunteer team, participants, and customers. However, after taking stock for a week or so, we started to get in touch with our Bread Shed participants to see how we can help. Supporting wellbeing through baking bread is what the Bakehouse and the Bread Shed project has at its heart, so supporting wellbeing is what we’re doing now. Via WhatsApp, and recently by video link, we’ve been chatting, laughing, baking, and maintaining connections. In these times of change we have to adapt, but stay true to our aims, and that’s what we’re trying to do. 

We can’t bake as a team at the moment, but we can bake at home. Our volunteers have been practicing their skills and feeding their families and neighbours. We’ve also started to sell flour to the community, and the community is embracing the challenge of baking their own bread. It’s so heartening to see breadmaking blooming in Poets’ Corner. We love seeing customers sharing their successes, and also recognising the joy baking can bring. 

This is something we want to see more of as we continue in this period of lockdown. So we’re going to try and make flour sales a regular thing. On Tuesday and Friday afternoons we’ll be selling bread flour from the Bakehouse door. In time we may even be able to get hold of some yeast, which we can sell to you too. In the meantime we’ll keep giving away a bit of our sourdough starter if you need something to kickstart your baking.

Thank you for all the support you’ve shown us. Take care, and stay safe. 

Following the most recent government announcement regarding the Covid-19 virus we have taken the hard decision to close the bakehouse as a temporary measure. The health and wellbeing of our team, and those we work with, is paramount, and we feel this it the right course of action.  If you have booked onto one of our workshops due to take place in the coming weeks we’ll be in contact.  Stoneham Bakehouse is committed to supporting the community’s wellbeing and we’ll be exploring ways in which we can continue to do this in these difficult times.

In the meantime we’ve posted a few recipes for you to have a try at home with.