Penny Calder: Baking, Handcrafted gifts

Penny Calder, a stay-at-home mother of two, “lives for Saturdays” at the market. In her first season, Penny added to the diversity of edible confections available at the market, infusing her home baked goods with her culinary panache and a zest of her home country.

An Australian transplant living in Grey County for the past eight years, Penny came to Canada equipped with post-secondary training as a qualified trade cook. She chose baking and pastries as her culinary outlet of choice because it allows her a greater window of creativity and experimentation that cannot be captured when cooking, for example, a roast beef. Baking actually requires thinking, she says, especially when converting Australian cooking increments to Canadian.

Rising at 5 a.m. every Friday to prepare for Saturday, Penny whips up a palette of delectable delights, including domestic favourites such as butter tarts and oatmeal-raisin cookies (a notable favourite of hers) as well as morsels with a foreign flare, including her acclaimed lamingtons. These cakes, made of vanilla sponge coated in chocolate and encrusted with flaked coconut, are a popular Australian dessert named after a national park in the countries Queensland state.

Penny also enjoys adapting recipes to fit her own preferences, such as a rhubarb pie she converted into bite-size tarts. Attending the market is a pastime which creates mutual advantage between Penny and her customers. Penny loves to socialize and serve patrons looking for tantalizing tastes that are, plainly, different from the rest! Feeling the rewards of a hard days labour after selling out almost every Saturday, Penny still drives home with friends and family eagerly awaiting leftovers. They usually end up disappointed! Its the freshness and quality of homemade that interplays with every flavour and Lamingtons are a must-try for curious taste buds!

This page checked with AtD