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We've been baking for over twenty years

And now we're growing throughout the South East

A little bit about

Heidi & our bakeries

Heidi has been bringing proper pastry and patisserie to England for over twenty years. The store was founded in Windsor by Heidi Daniel, who with Edward and Rory, continues to run the business today.

These days the business is much bigger, with our Windsor central kitchen serving over six restaurants – including Caracoli in New Alresford and Foggs on the First Floor of Daniel in Windsor.

Although our kitchen has grown, many of our methods have not. With the help of a mixer and a pastry break, our team handcraft each of the hundreds of items we sell a day using traditional ingredients, many of which are imported from France.

Our little blue van – Bakemobile 001 – then transports these products across Berkshire, Surrey and Hampshire four times a week, where the items are proven and baked off each morning. This ensures that what hits our counters has only minutes before come out of the oven, which in pastry, makes all the difference.

Oh, and we try to have fun whilst we’re baking too. Whether it’s creating the world-famous Megharrycinno coffee, or baking jam roly polys with Harry Redknapp, we’re always on the lookout for cool stuff to do with our craft.

What goes into Heidi

The Almond Croissant

Ingredients

It starts with great ingredients. Local where we can; imported for when we need authenticity. In our pastry items, it’s that AOP Charentes-Poitou butter brought in from France that gives that distinct nutty taste.

Shaping

We then make dough. In the case of croissant dough, we’re mixing hundreds of kilos a week. It gets sheeted with the help of the pastry break and then cut, filled and shaped by the tourier by hand.
Heidi Almond Croissant

Transport

Bakemobile 01 then takes the shaped (but unproven and unbaked) pastries to each of our branches, where they wait ready for their turn to be baked off in the morning. If you see our little blue van, give it a wave!

Proofing & Baking

Every night before the branch closes the pastries for the next day go into a special retarder prover. This keeps them nice and cool until about 5am where the temperature slowly rises. They’ve usually risen by 7am where they get baked off and finished by each of our teams. Magic!

#Memories

That time we baked roly polys with Harry Redknapp