After a long break over the busy Christmas period, the Thomas the Baker blog is back! As I’m sure you know, the run up to Christmas and the festive period itself is very busy for us and January gives us a chance to get caught up, but we’re back up and running with plenty of new things to get you going this year. I’ve got a couple of new things to introduce for you today, so read on to find out what yummy goodies we currently have on offer and how you can get a free sample! Today we’re introducing something new: Porridge Pots! As of today. these are available in any of our shops (find your closest one here) for £1.00. I tried my first one today and I’ve got to tell you how quick and easy it was to make, not to mention yummy. If you fancy something warm and filling to start your day rather than just…

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Here’s a quick sneak peek at some of our new Christmas cupcakes featuring Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Snowmen! Hand decorated in our craft bakery, these will be available in our shops as of tomorrow, just in time for Christmas. What do you think of them? Cute, aren’t they?! As a reminder, we still have a lovely range of Christmas products and hampers, perfect for last minute Christmas presents, available in our online shop. The last date to get orders in guaranteed to arrive in time for Christmas is next Wednesday, the 18th December. Unfortunately we can’t get these super cute cupcakes to you via the website at the moment, but pop into one of our shops to get one for yourself!

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Every year, staff, friends and family at Thomas the Baker make a big effort to put something back into the community that supports us by raising money for charity. In the past, I’ve taken part in sponsored walks (one of which we got very lost on and managed to walk an extra 2 or 3 miles!). But this year there has been a massive push and we’ve managed to raise a total of £9500 for the Martin House Hospice charity which provides care for terminally ill children. This has come from various places as well as the usual annual sponsored walk: every shop has a collection box, and this year even saw the Manager of our Malton shop, Emma Divine-Hard, and Claire Pickering, from the bakery head office, take on the challenge of a tandem parachute jump and raise more than £1300 between them alone all in the name of charity. The money raised has already gone towards a circus…

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We’ve recently had a lot of press coverage, particularly of for our favourite Christmas products: mince pies and our new Triple Chocolate Stout Christmas Pudding! The top image here features my sister (on the left) and my grandad in the middle along with another lady, Claire, from the bakery showing off the recipe for the Christmas pudding. Then we have our feature from Living North and the Scarborough Voice. We’ve also been mentioned in the following places too for our mince pie success in Good Housekeeping: Daily Mail York Press British Baker The Helmsley Town Blog Gazette & Herald Do let us know if you mention us on your site – we’d be happy to add you to our list of press features. It’s always very exciting to us to find out that people like our products enough to talk about them in the press or on the internet!

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  I’ve mentioned before how busy the festive time of year is around Thomas the Baker, and we just like to make it a little bit more busy for ourselves! We’re currently putting together a luxury Christmas hamper that we just know you’ll love. This includes a good sampling of our yummy Christmas products including: 2 boxes of 6 award winning mince pies. If you remember from a recent post, these came out top in a taste test by Good Housekeeping magazine, even outshining the likes of Marks and Spencer, Bettys and Harrods. 1 Luxury Christmas Pudding. This has also won several awards, including the prestigious Gold Star at the Great Taste Awards. 1 small hand decorated fruit cake made to a deliciously moist recipe and topped with french glace cherries, walnuts and brazil nuts. Traditional waxed real Yorkshire Wensleydale cheese with a mild taste and crumbly texture. In Yorkshire, it’s a local tradition to serve your Christmas cake with a…

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Christmas is always a super busy time at Thomas the Baker preparing the mince pies, Christmas puddings and Christmas cakes. They start planning how much of everything we’re going to need right back in June, with meetings to decide on the amounts of sweet mince for the pies and to start preparing the Christmas puddings. There are even a number of people who volunteer up their skills to help out with the Christmas rush. I’ve been recruiting a few times over the Christmas period just to pop lids on mince pie! They even get the managers out from behind their desks lidding mince pies and folding up boxes! And this year, we’ve decided to make it even more difficult for ourselves but all the sweeter for you by adding another Christmas delight to our list: another Christmas Pudding! But this is no ordinary Christmas pudding – a lot of thought, time and effort has gone into this one, and it’s…

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  You might only just be starting to think about Christmas, but at Thomas the Baker we’ve been thinking about it for months! In fact, when I worked in the bakery a couple of years ago, I was surprised to see that they were starting to prepare for the Christmas rush at the end of summer! Now I always knew our mince pies were good, but it seems like lots of other people agree too – we’ve recently been named among the best mince pies in the country by Good Housekeeping, only just missing out on first place to Heston Blumenthal. Ours were awarded 73/100 and complimented on the delicious fruity filling, thin pastry and homemade appearance. We’re so pleased about this, particularly because ours came out above big names such as Bettys, Harrods, and Marks & Spencer. Not only do ours taste better, but they also come at a fraction of the price of other runner ups too –…

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One of the best things about being part of the Thomas family is getting to try out new products and hand them out to my friends and coworkers too. So yesterday, I had a message from my dad to pop round to the shop in Ripon to pick up a box. Arriving back at the office, I was pleasantly surprised with these lovely Halloween treats! There were a couple of bat biscuits and ghost biscuits, two boxes of Caramel Crispy Bites and some owl cupcakes, which my dad has informed me are called ‘Hooters Cupcakes’ – although I’m not sure how well that will go down! I was supposed to get some good pictures using my proper camera, but forgot to take it! So I ended up getting a bit of help from my colleagues at Bronco to get these photos on their phones and tweet them out! These photos come courtesy of some of the Bronco team – Becky, David, Kean,…

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  Recently we’ve been working hard on our range of artisan breads. A lot of people don’t tend to realise the amount of work that goes into a loaf like these. At Thomas the Baker, we pride ourselves on delivering only the best bread to you, so we don’t pack them full of additives so that they’ll last longer. Instead, they are baked every morning (early morning!) by our craft bakers so that they can be delivered to the shops as fresh as can be. We put a lot of hard work into developing these breads, and here you can see the way in which some of our artisan loaves are created. These are the Pain de Campagne being made by ‘the two Steves’ – Steve Simpson and Steve Cockayne. The Pain de Campagne is a traditional French loaf, meaning simply ‘country bread’. Here you see them moulding the dough, placing it and cutting it before baking it on the stone…

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  You might have noticed over in our sidebar a bit of a reference to our sister shop, Thomas of Helmsley. While our shops are all primarily bakers, this one branches out a little bit, so I’m here today to tell you a bit more about it. Based in Helmsley, this shop has gone through a few changes over the years. When I was little, I knew it as the butchers, Nicholson’s, run by one of my best friend’s family. See that man in the top photo there? That’s my friend’s dad, Ben Nicholson, and one of the original butchers from Nicholson’s all those years ago. In the intervening time he was a minister and a postman, before turning back to butchery – you can see a pretty interesting photo of him combining his interests at the Gazette and Herald! We’ve had the shop for a few years now, and have slowly been adding more and more quality products, both of…

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