King Arthur’s association with loaf-shaped foodstuffs predates the musical Spamalot by a couple of centuries. Just returned from The Baker’s Store & Café run by the King Arthur Flour Company in Norwich, Vermont.
Here’s the receipt:
A round clay cloche pan, for baking breads and biscuits. My last one cracked last month after years of use. This one’s a different brand, made in Virginia, and looks even sturdier. The pan itself is a round dish over an inch deep. The cover resembles a pith helmet.
Another flat clay baking thing: A rectangular baking stone suggested for cookies, though I’ll be doing bread and pizza on it.
Colored markers that you can write on food with, since the ink is really food coloring.
A batter-stirring implement that’s a circle of thick wire imbedded in a wooden handle. This is only marginally more effective than, say, a spoon for stirring bread. But it is way cooler.
Parchment paper. In case I want to write something on parchment, I guess, like a declaration of independence or something.
Sprinkles. It was raining really hard outside, and sprinkling within. Yellow shiny “sanding sugar.” “Mini-flower”-shaped “edible confetti.” Edible flowers, by any other name, would sprinkle as sweet.
A 2-pound bag of Ancient Grains Flour Blend. “Ancient Grains” has become a natural-foods marketing buzzword. I’ve bought Ancient Grains granola from Costco. I first heard the term from King Arthur, however—being a monarch in the 5th century A.D., he ought to know from ancient. Ancient Grains, somewhat disappointingly, isn’t some stash of long-lost flour dredged up from a mummer’s plot outside Stonehenge. It’s just stuff that we have on good authority was used in baking a long time ago. Like wheat? Well, like amaranth, millet, sorghum and quinoa. It’s gluten-free, but it’s not really meant to be the only flour you use; King Arthur (the company) suggests you replace one fifth of the conventional flour in a recipe with this. So you can feel ancient. Or maybe the dough gets ancient while you don’t—the Pizza of Dorian Gray!
A donut pan. A pan, that is, with circular indentations, like a muffin pan, only not so deep and with holes in the middle. Baked donuts are not technically donuts. These would be better described as donut-shaped mini-cakes. But who’s complaining?
A 10-pound bag of King Arthur White Flour, just like you’d buy in any supermarket. Only I bought it at the King Arthur Company in Norwich, Vermont, so there.
Two slices of cheese pizza, a roasted veggie sandwich, an egg salad sandwich, a chocolate cupcake with white chips imbedded in vanilla frosting, a dome-shaped sticky pink dessert, two cups of organic coffee, a couple of esoteric brands of soda pop and a long baguette pulled and trimmed to look kind of like a palm tree—all from the store café. Lunch, yet so much more than lunch.
On the way out, I took photos of my daughters sitting on an Arthurian throne inside the entrance of the shop. I half expected the Lady of the Lake to arise from some nearby trout pond bearing a sword with which she would slash the baguette in my hand into fine slices (to serve at a round table, naturally).
We’d barely hit home before several of these items had already been put to use. Donut-shaped mini-cake with mini-flower-shaped edible confetti, anyone?