Did the UK miss out Autumn altogether this year?!
This week we seem to have gone from warm sunshine & smoothies… straight to plummeting temperatures!

To mark this time of year, Rex has been ringing in the changes. We like to do LOTS of new things as you may have noticed including some seasonal fun:

1. Spooky specials

a. Following the popularity of Twice Baked Hazelnut Croissants, we introduced Twice Baked Pain au Chocolat Bats. To make these, we made bat-shaped Pain au Chocolat, baked them, soaked them in syrup, baked them again & topped with icing sugar. These went down a storm!

b. We launched White chocolate coated home-made raspberry marshmallow on gingerbread – pointy teacakes that we called “Witches’ Hats”. Yum! If you enjoyed these, you might love the Hot Chocolate specials we will shortly launch all to be served with home-made marshmallow pieces.

2. Spain-inspired breads
Some of you may have noticed we love our cross-cultural staff 🙂 Our new Spanish night baker, like all our staff, has brought some of his own country into the bakery. We love Spanish food generally and are interested to find out about some new-to-Britain flavour twists & styles of sourdough breads. For instance:
a. Enter Pan Gallego, which we bake on a Thursday & Saturday. This is a larger sized 600g thick crust sourdough with a little “button” on top that has be
come a firm favourite in the bakery since it was introduced. It’s a mainly white wheatflour bread with quite a lot of rye, with a high degree of water in the dough to give large ciabatta-style holes in the bread crumb. Like all our sourdoughs, it still takes 3 days to make but we divide & shape the loaves only in the last few hours, which is quite a different method to other Rex breads.

b. Or try Oat Groat, Sesame & Lemon with a touch of cinnamon which we 1st baked on Sunday – it even sounds Moorish as well as more-ish!
c. And we love the look & taste of new Crystal bread, truly a feat for the bakers. Handling the super hydrated dough is very tricky to do because of the virtually unheard of levels of water in the dough. The bakers stretch this dough into a thin long shape before letting the purposefully very large air bubbles form. See the lovely result being cut here

3. Soups
Now a proudly award winning baker, the Rex baker has long been a keen & expert cook. Having already salted beef, pulled pork, home-made pickles, mayonnaise & pesto for the Gourmet sandwich range.. it’s high time to move on to Rex-made stock-based Soup with the colder weather arriving this week.
Speciality soup served with Sourdough bread or Rex rolls already include Chicken & Chickpea; Minted garden Pea & Ham;

Fennel, Rex-made harissa, Smoky bacon, tomato & chickpea; Cannelini bean & chorizo. Always a mixture of the exotic & the traditional, and all of them are planned to be delicious but it will be up to you. We will refine the soup menu depending on Rex customer feedback.

4. Savoury tarts & Pasties
Following on from our best selling Sausage Rolls, the Rex Baker has been version testing traditional local open pie recipes and our family’s firm favourite – Pasties with Rump Steak. Did you know that the vast majority of pies in Britain are eaten in the winter months, that they have had a resurgence since the last recession & are more popular than ever before, so that we will soon be consuming more than £1 billion worth each year? The Rex range will be special because we hand-make every element from pastry to filling preparation and everything in between. So dear lovely Friends of Rex Bakery watch this space, they’re coming very soon 🙂

5. Open all days!
With all this handmade baked food for you to try coming from our award winning bakery, it only seems right that we should open our cosy warm bakery/ coffee house to the community EVERY DAY. We opened Sunday in November for the 1st time which seemed to be very popular with Sunday shoppers, so we are planning 10.30 – 2.30 each Sunday from now on. And with more staff in place we now plan to open each & every Monday from next 10th November.
Hope to see you soon on one of these days very soon!