Much of what drives me forward as a cook is the desire to preserve those warm feelings of family and home that I experienced as a child, eating meals so lovingly made by my family. Food connects us to each other and to all the home cooks that came before – and, what I’ve found reading through Sophie Kaftal and Bobby Zielinski’s Kitten and the Bear Cookbook is that they’re not only preserving the sweet and most delicious offerings from gardens and orchards, they’re maintaining and building a “…fairy tale life full of beauty, tradition, and the art of daily ritual.”(2) For those who have never visited Kitten and The Bear in Toronto, Ontario, Canada it’s a café and retail shop where they offer a large selection of their jams, baked treats, as well as home goods and gifts. While I’ve never had the opportunity to visit KATB in real life, their cookbook offers a delightful at-home experience.
Kaftal and Zielinski take their craft seriously and, reading through the opening section – All About Preserving – they urge and empower home cooks to enjoy creating their own jams. I feel confident about my skills in the kitchen except when it comes to making jam – my primary concern is inadvertently botulitizing my loved ones. However, reading through the process outlined in the book, Kaftal and Zielinski have demystified this seemingly impossible activity by giving home cooks sound information and step-by-step instruction. The section, All About Preserving, is organized into 7 parts: Types of Preserves, Jam Making Theory, The Three Main Ingredients, How to Add Flavourings, Sourcing and Preparing Your Fruit, Canning Step-By-Step, and Tools and Equipment. Organized in this way, the process of making preserves is meant to be successful and enjoyable.
The recipes in Kitten and The Bear Cookbook are divided into two parts: Part One: Preserves (Berries, Stone Fruit, Tree Fruit, Citrus, and Tropical, Vine, and Other) and Part Two: Scones, Sweets, Savoury Delights, and Drinks. One would think that I got right into making all sorts of jam, but, they would be wrong! It was actually the section dedicated to making a wide-variety of scones that caught my attention. Scones are one of my most favourite things to bake because, while most baking recipes require room temperature ingredients to ensure the best flavour and texture, scones are made with cold ingredients. So, if I wake up on a Saturday morning yearning for something warm and buttery straight from the oven, scones are the thing to make (which is why I haven’t made muffins in such a long time). It also didn’t hurt that when I shared a sneak peek of this cookbook in my Instagram stories one of their loyal customers told me that KATB scones were “the business!”
Of course the recipe I started with is their Signature Buttermilk Scones because, as I read through reviews of their café, this is the item on their menu that seemed to get the most love (although to be fair, this sounds like a very beloved place – one person even said there wasn’t enough room in the review to list all the glowing things they had to say). I appreciated their step-by-step instructions on how to make their signature scones, which were also accompanied by step-by-step photos. Unlike other scone recipes, the unbaked scones are chilled in the freezer for at least 4 hours before you bake them and, once you’re ready to get them in the oven it’s important to note that the oven temperature is lower (325C) and the scones bake for longer (35 minutes). The resulting scones are buttery and flakey – some of the best scones I’ve made! It should also be said that in freezing the unbaked scones, you’ve set your future self up for success as you can then have freshly baked scones whenever the mood or hankering hits.
From this master recipe, the following scone recipes are variations of that signature recipe. Since we had some birthdays to celebrate this month, I baked their Birthday Cake Scones which had one surprising ingredient: vanilla cake mix! As Kaftal and Zielinski describe these scones in the notes to the recipe, “there is some sort of magic about the nostalgic flavour of cake mix that just can’t be replicated”(213) and, I found that adding the cake mix not only added to the flavour but also gave a little cakey tenderness to the crumb. To add to the celebratory nature of these scones, rainbow sprinkles are added to the batter and, vanilla buttercream is piped onto the scones after they’re baked.
My daughter and I loved the scones with fruit added in! I made recipes for both the Apple Fritter Scones as well as the Blueberry Crumble Scones and they were delicious! I adore how well Kaftal and Zielinski weave nostalgia throughout their recipes – the cinnamon streusel topping on the Blueberry Crumble Scones reminds me of the coffee cakes I enjoyed when I visited my extended family as a child and the Apple Fritter Scones harken to those wonderful doughnuts my sister and I enjoyed as a rare treat when we were kids.
Normally, my daughter avoids any type of dessert laced with raisins or raisin-adjacent dried fruit. But obviously the smell of the Brie and Black Currant Scones as they baked in the oven was too overpowering to avoid! Unlike the sweeter scones I made, this scone recipe leans more into savoury territory through the addition of garlic powder, onion powder, and brie cheese. The sweet black currants and the course sugar used to garnish the scones offer a lovely complement to the other savoury ingredients. The brie and currant pairing are perfect here and the way the brie melts into the scone as it bakes is really divine.
There is something so warm and inviting as I flipped through the pages of Kitten and the Bear Cookbook – the soft pastel colours, the farmhouse-vibes, gorgeous photography, and not least, the sweetly illustrated end papers by Melody Tam. While authors Kaftal and Zielinski refer to their tearoom in the introduction as “secret-garden-style,” they have also managed to capture this vibe in their cookbook, which is especially lovely for home cooks who want to experience KATB from the comforts of their own kitchens. Kitten and the Bear Cookbook offers home cooks useful instruction on how to make their own KATB-inspired preserves as well as tearoom-worthy baked goods.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Penguin Canada for providing me with a free, review copy of this book. I did not receive monetary compensation for my post, and all thoughts and opinions expressed are my own. All links are given for informational purposes only, there are no affiliated links.
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