The festive spirit is alive and well at Bread & Butter Bakery and Café as the team prepares a delicious range of traditional Christmas gifts for all ages and price ranges.
Bread & Butter’s selection of Christmas products is available now until the big day and includes their popular Traditional Christmas Hamper, a variety of beautiful Gingerbread Houses and DIY house kits, a sumptuous festive picnic hamper, as well as some smaller treats, such as their delicate Christmas Mince Tarts.
The Christmas Hamper showcases a selection of traditional festive goods, including those baked to a recipe brought to New Zealand from Germany many years ago.
It includes German Marzipan Stollen, made with organic ingredients, non-sulphurised fruit, and homemade marzipan for the perfect Christmas-inspired fruit toast, as well as Christmas Mince Tarts, made with organic fruit macerated in port and brandy in a delicate tart shell. Moreish Christmas biscuits – Ginger Shortbread and Chocolate Crinkles with spiced fruit – round out the offer.
The Christmas baking is also available to buy individually.
And those who prefer a traditional gingerbread house at Christmas are spoilt for choice at Bread & Butter.
Customers can opt for a fully made-up house in either a finely decorated, lattice-style version or a kids’ version, that comes complete with lollies.
DIY gingerbread house kits are also available, which come with the house parts, a cake board, two piping bags, and assembly instructions. (DIY kit customers will also need icing sugar, egg white, and optional food colouring and lollies to finish decorating their house).
Meanwhile, the Picnic Hamper serves four and is perfect for a balmy evening get-together or intimate lunch.
It includes a mushroom and three-cheese dip, which gets baked into a mini loaf of kumara and cumin sourdough. The hollowed-out bits of the loaf serve as crackers to scoop out the dip.
The picnic also features a delicious parmesan-herbed side of house-smoked salmon, a mini Canadian Cottage Ham made to Canadian head chef Chad’s family recipe, a mulled wine braised beetroot salad, homemade tabouleh, three dips, and eight mini sweet treats – strawberry and vanilla tarts, mince tarts, Portuguese tarts, and toasted marshmallow brownie.
Bread & Butter owner Isabel Pasch says that while the past few months have been tough, planning for Christmas has helped lift her team’s spirits and she’s looking forward to having customers back in store just in time for the festive season.
“We love this time of the year when the special Christmas cutters and ingredients come out and the whole bakery smells so festive,” she says.
“This year, we’ve been trying new recipes and old favourites and we can’t wait to properly get back into things.
“Like many Christmas traditions, the stollen is a recipe I brought with me from Germany, and we’ve been baking it in my bakery for 12 years. It has a very old tradition that goes back to the early 15th century in Saxony. A festival takes place in the city of Dresden for which they bake a stollen that weighs between three and four tonnes!
“A carriage takes the cake in a parade through the streets of Dresden to the Christmas market, where it is ceremoniously cut into pieces and distributed among the crowd for a small sum, which goes to charity. A special knife, the Grand Dresden Stollen Knife, which is 1.6m long and weighs 12kg, is used to festively cut the Stollen at the Dresden Christmas fair.
“Of course, our Bread & Butter stollen comes in a slightly more manageable size (500g).”
While the festive treats are available until Christmas, customers are advised to pre-order their Bread & Butter treats via the Grey Lynn and Whangaparaoa stores or online to avoid disappointment.
