Black Isle Bakery

If you are anywhere near Hoxton on a Saturday, do head over to Hoxton Street Market where you will find a stall run by the Black Isle Bakery. We actually travel pretty far across town to get our hands on baker Ruth Barry’s delicious treats. Yep. They are that good. Barry grew up on the Black Isle, and studied art, before turning her hand to baking and working with Christophe Vasseur in Paris. Now that she has returned to London, she has set up the Black Isle Bakery. Her stall at Hoxton Market is an essay in minimalism: it sells a small selection of savoury buns filled with things like mushroom and thyme or cabbage and goat’s cheese, and just one or two sweet things. When we went last week, as well as picking up one of each flavour of savoury bun (including the best smoked salmon sandwich we have ever eaten), we bought bite size cakes flavoured with lemon, pistachio and coffee, and a small slab of melt-in-your-mouth tablet.  It all tastes deliciously good, yes, but as well as that, you have the sensation of eating something beautifully crafted, which is immensely pleasurable and satisfying. Do have a look at the Black Isle Bakery website too, where Barry photographs her delicacies so that they look like still-life oil paintings. If anything, her goods taste even better than they look, and that’s saying something.