Why baking is the most pleasurable of all culinary branches – there is no real pressure to do it

Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra had an enviable childhood. From a Hindu Brahmin family, she toggled easily between living on sugar plantations in what was then British Guiana, visiting her grandparents in rural India, where one grandfather was a Hindu priest and the other basically owned their village, and Catholic convent school. She attended university in Canada and spent a year in Spain, where she met her Dutch-Jewish husband. They now live in the Netherlands.

In the introduction to Warm Bread and Honey Cake (2009), Pagrach-Chandra writes, “Treasured memories are infused in homemade breads, cakes and pastries. I can hardly remember a time when they have failed to lift my spirits in some way.

“Post-colonial plantation life in Guyana was characterised by a sense of Britishness that was enhanced by the presence of a large number of expatriate families in the otherwise small and isolated community. It found its chief expression in food, and teatime was a favourite part of the day.

“Sometimes this was no more than a hurried cup of tea in the kitchen with a pastry or a buttered slice of homemade bread; at other times, it was a lavish spread on a cool veranda.

“If our own house had meagre offerings that afternoon, it was quite normal for us children to head for a friend’s house with richer pickings. Depleted tea tables were no obstacle to enjoyment. We simply made our way to the kitchen and adopted such well-feigned looks of starvation that it took a very hard-hearted cook not to respond with a plateful of fresh cake, coconut roll, pine tarts, cheese rolls or patties.