About

Berry Chantilly is run by Kate, a home baker.

Berry Chantilly is named after one of my favourite cakes - three sponge layers, a ridiculous amount of fresh berries, and a cloud of whipped cream that looks far too confident for something held together mostly by faith. I named this journal after it because the cake always seemed to get the balance right somehow: care without fussiness, made to share, gone too fast. That's the kind of food I want to write about.

Napoleon cake is one I learned the hard way - not because it's technically difficult, but because I kept wanting to eat it the same day I made it, and that's exactly where you go wrong. A freshly assembled Napoleon is stiff and separate, the layers crunching apart the second you press a fork in. It looks done. It isn't. The whole point of it is the overnight wait - the twelve or so hours where the cream slowly coaxes each thin, flaky layer into something almost impossibly tender, the whole thing collapsing gently into itself. What you get the next day is completely different from what you put in the fridge: same ingredients, same layers, but softer and more unified, like the cake finally figured out what it was supposed to be. I find that hard to argue with.

I love Marcel Proust, and I love madeleines, which might be a coincidence or might explain everything about why I ended up writing a food journal - honestly, I can't fully tell anymore. In one of his books, someone dips a madeleine in lime-blossom tea, takes a single bite, and a whole childhood rushes back from somewhere he hadn't been in decades. There's a name for that: the Proust effect. The idea that a taste or a smell can slip right past everything rational and hand you a memory you didn't even know you were still carrying.

I started keeping notes on recipes because I kept losing the ones I liked. A scribbled quantity on the back of an envelope, a pinch of this adjusted from last time, a note about the oven running hot - the kind of thing that lives in your head for exactly three days and then disappears. Writing it down started as purely practical. But somewhere along the way it turned into something else: a record of what I was making, what I was thinking about while I was making it, who I was feeding. This journal is that, made a little more deliberate.

Honest disclaimer upfront: I'm not a professional baker, a trained chef, or a nutritionist. I cook and bake and write down what worked. Taste is personal, so not everyone is going to love what I love - someone will go crazy for a recipe I'd happily skip, and someone else won't touch the one I'm most proud of. That's fine. This is just my taste, my kitchen, my notes. Not the official rulebook on anything.

Smell catches me off guard more than anything else does. I walk my dogs most mornings and cook most evenings, and both have a way of turning up memories I wasn't looking for - my dogs, for the record, are mostly interested in whether the walk goes past the bakery. One smell and I'm somewhere else entirely for a moment: a kitchen I haven't stood in for years, a season, a person. It doesn't ask permission.

There's an actual reason for that, and I find it oddly comforting: smell is wired more directly into the parts of the brain that handle emotion and memory than any of our other senses. A smell doesn't get processed and sorted the way something you see or hear does - it goes almost straight to the amygdala, which handles emotion, and the hippocampus, which handles memory, at nearly the same time. That's why the Proust effect works the way it does: you don't go looking for the memory. It just shows up, feelings first.

It's why wet earth after rain, or bread baking somewhere down the street, or a particular brand of soap, can stop me mid-sentence. I'm not trying to remember anything. But something arrives anyway - a mood, an afternoon, the way a kitchen used to smell before it was a kitchen I'd left behind. I let it hang around for a bit before I move on.

This journal is all of that collected in one place. What I love to cook. What I love to eat. The smells that stop me in my tracks and what's waiting on the other side of them. Berry Chantilly is my way of keeping it - not just the recipes, but everything tangled up in them.