Features / Food
Baking Bake Off bakes – in a laundrette
When The Great British Bake Off opening credits roll, most people are looking forward to an hour of salivating at the screen whilst eating as many biscuits as humanly possible. Not Lily Grist though. She’s filled with fear. Fear of the challenge that lies ahead.
She’s taken on the self-named ‘Bake Off Challenge.’ To try and make every cake, biscuit and loaf that comes out of the Bake Off oven, to then sell to customers at her cafe-cum-laundrette At The Well on Cheltenham Road.
It’s week two and Lily is hard at work in At The Well’s very tiny kitchen. A far cry from the spacious white gazebos of the BBC Two programme, it’s a squeeze to get two people in.
The walls are lined with boxes of eggs, spices and flour. A recipe for shortbread is pinned to a shelf, alongside a print out of the outlines of pairs of knickers.
It’s biscuit week.
Already cooling in the window are shortbread, wafting a buttery aroma through the family-run business. Gingerbread dough is cooling in the fridge, and biscuit knickers are waiting to be iced.
At The Well is shut on a Friday, which chef Lily uses as the perfect opportunity to try out Mary and Paul’s bakes from Wednesday’s show. She successfully completed the challenge last year, but it wasn’t easy.
“It was very stressful, but I survived,” she admits after closing the oven door.
So why put herself through it all again?
“I just love Bake Off. It’s nice for something to be so accessible and so honest.
“When you look at blogs and social media, you’re bombarded with this perfect life and baking isn’t like that. It’s a disaster, it’s temperamental and it can be frustrating, but it’s reality.”
So despite the jelly not setting on her jaffa cakes, and a rather fraught mirror cake experience, Lily fully intends to keep baking the recipes for customers to consume throughout the week.
She’s already noticed that more people are buying cake, “which is what you want during Bake Off”.
Lily owns and runs At The Well with her two sisters Ellen and Cassie. They bought the building five years ago when it was derelict and opened after a 12-month refit.
As well as offering brunch while you wait for your laundry to be done, At The Well is an internet cafe and hosts live music nights. Their ethos is to never say no, which has resulted in the space recently being used to film a car advert.
Top tips from a seasoned baker? “Give yourself plenty of time, and don’t bake tired.”
Week two’s show stopper was a gingerbread story. Lily made the familiar story of three sisters opening a cafe launderette:
is needed now More than ever
Read more: The people behind the Bake Off magic
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