Baking Log

The Record

I started baking in January 2026 and I have done four things since, so I built this running log the same way I built the reading log. This is a living post. I append a new entry each time something comes out of the oven and add a new year section when the calendar rolls over. Each entry lists the bake, where the recipe came from, how many times I have made it, and a star score.

Four bakes is a small number, and the order they happened in is the interesting part. Each one taught me the thing the next one needed.

How I Score

I score every bake on one axis, which is whether I would make it again. Five stars, no half stars, same as the books, because the point is to force a clean call rather than sit between two numbers. I score after eating it rather than after looking at it, since a loaf can come out of the tin looking correct and still be dull on the plate.

A bake only gets a score once it is finished and eaten. If I abandon a recipe halfway through the method it stays in the log with no score, so the record stays honest about what I actually made.

Stars	Meaning
★★★★★	In the rotation, I will bake it again without thinking about it
★★★★☆	Good, I will come back to it
★★★☆☆	Fine, one more go to fix something
★★☆☆☆	Weak, unlikely to repeat
★☆☆☆☆	Did not work

2026

Bake	Source	Bakes	Score
The Potato Bun	My own recipe, built over two batches	2	★★★★★
Finnish Blueberry Pie	DW Food, Varpu’s family recipe	2	★★★★☆
Swedish Kladdkaka	Classic Swedish home recipe	1	★★★★★
Banana Bread	Standard method, adapted	1	★★★☆☆

The Thread

The scores say whether I would make it again. This says why I made it in the first place. Read top to bottom it shows how one bake handed me the next.

The Potato Bun

This one came out of the burger rather than out of any interest in baking. I had the meat and the method where I wanted them and the bun was the part still letting it down, because brioche carries too much sugar and fresh potato buns are not sold here. So I made them, twice, and the second batch became the recipe I still use. I was not trying to learn to bake. I was trying to finish a burger.

Finnish Blueberry Pie

I watched a DW Food video called Why Finns are obsessed with blueberries on a Saturday afternoon, where a Finnish blogger called Varpu makes a pie from scratch and calls it a five minute family recipe. The recipe was buried in ten minutes of footage with no timestamp, so I pulled it out with an AWS Transcribe pipeline, adapted it for UK ingredients, and baked it that evening. The second bake went into a deep ceramic pot instead of the metal tin because I was giving it to a friend and a white pot looks better, which turned 25 minutes into 55 and taught me that the tin is part of the recipe.

Swedish Kladdkaka

I asked Claude for something similar to the pie and it suggested kladdkaka. I watched a few videos, then ended up on one about a Swedish bakery prepping cardamom buns in the morning, decided Sweden looked good, and booked a trip to Stockholm for the end of May. The ingredients then sat in my kitchen for weeks because I did not want to eat a whole cake alone. On 2 May I was carrying 30 eggs home from Notting Hill Farmers Market, a group of girls noticed the eggs, I asked where they were from, and they were Swedish. I went home and baked it that afternoon.

Banana Bread

This one kept turning up in front of me for weeks, so I bought bananas and left them on the counter until the skins went black. It also covered something the first three had not. The pie forgave everything and the kladdkaka punished a long bake, so both of those ran on the oven, and this one runs on the fruit instead. Fresh out of the tin it ranked bottom of the sweet three. Cut face down in the cast iron skillet with butter the next morning it was better than it had been fresh, which is how the rest of the loaf got eaten.

What Each One Taught Me

The progression is the reason this log exists. Every bake handed the next one a variable I had not had to think about before.

Bake	The new variable
Potato Bun	Dough and proving, and that a second batch beats a first
Finnish Blueberry Pie	Bake time and the skewer test, then that the tin changes both
Swedish Kladdkaka	Pulling it early on purpose, and not trusting the skewer
Banana Bread	The ingredient rather than the oven, since the fruit sets the result

On The List

Things I intend to bake but have not started yet.

Banana bread again, with chocolate in it. The plain loaf was the control and the second bake gets the addition.

Cardamom buns, from the Swedish bakery video that sent me to Stockholm in the first place.

Beyond those two the list is open. I tend to pick the next bake off something I have watched rather than plan it in advance.

Baking Flow

This diagram tracks the chronological progression downward, with the year as a marker where it starts and the bakes following under it. I extend it as the log grows.

graph TD
    Y1[2026] --> A[The Potato Bun January]
    A --> B[Finnish Blueberry Pie February]
    B --> C[Swedish Kladdkaka May]
    C --> D[Banana Bread September]
    D --> N[Next Bake To Be Decided]

    classDef year fill:#D4A017,stroke:#8A6A0F,color:#1A1205,font-weight:bold;
    classDef current fill:#1F6F54,stroke:#0F3D2E,color:#FFFFFF;
    classDef pending fill:#E5E5E5,stroke:#9A9A9A,color:#555555;
    class Y1 year;
    class D current;
    class N pending;

Summary

This log captures the order I have baked things in, how many times I made each one, and how each scored. I append new bakes, update the count and score fields, and add a fresh year section as it continues. The flow diagram extends downward with each new entry.