Blog & Bake with King Arthur Flour - G+ Food Bloggers Community Event

Hi, I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and this is another in a series of our Google+ Bloggers Community series of continuing education and events and everything that we run out of here once a week. And tonight it's my pleasure to introduce King Arthur Flour, to bring them here for you and talk about their upcoming Blog and Bake. Alright, so what I'm going to do is I'd like to introduce a representative from King Arthur Flour, and she's down in the middle there.

Hello, I'm Alison Kerbisch.

And we have Matt Weber over in the far corner, and he's going to be doing a demo for you. So I'm going to turn it over to Alison, and she's going to explain to you all about Blog'n Bake. Take it away, Alison.

Thanks, Chef Dennis. It's a real pleasure to be here with you, so thank you for helping us organize this, and thank you, Matt, for being here to do the demo. I'm really excited to to see that. And thanks to everybody who's here with us tonight. It's exciting to have you all interested in Blog Bake and working with King Arthur Flour. So I'm Alison and I manage blogger relations here, so I've heard from many of you already with entries and that's wonderful, thank you very much. This event tonight is focused on Blog Bake, this multi-day baking event that we host here in Norwich, Vermont each year, but this Hangout is also a bigger opportunity for us to get to know the food blogger community here on Google+. So we're really excited to connect with everybody tonight, and we look forward to hearing from you about general opportunities to work with us even beyond Blog Bake. So a little bit about Blog Bake itself, it's a— this year it will be the 3rd annual event. It's a 3-day event that will be held at our Norwich headquarters, and it's really aimed at bringing bloggers together to experience King Arthur Flour's passion and expertise around baking, so that you can share it with your audiences. We're actually working this year with a couple of great partners, Cabot Creamery Cooperative and Simon Pearce Restaurant and Glass, so that'll be a nice way to tie it all together in a very Vermont way. And this year's event is April 21st through 23rd. It includes a tour of a couple of local farms, that we actually work with on a regular basis here. We'll be learning to bake pizza in a wood-fired oven, learning about basic yeast breads and whole grains, how to choose the right flour for whatever you're baking, and we're actually going to have a really fun team-building pie class. Matt did something like that last year, so maybe he can talk a little bit about that. We're also going to have a fun session with our bloggers and social media team to try to learn a little bit from each other about food blogging and social media and how we can all work together and, and do even better at what we do. So we're, we're very excited about this year's event and we're glad that you all are as well. So tonight we're actually giving away an invitation to this year's Blog Bake and The way that you can enter is you can actually find all of the details on the event page, but basically you just need to email me, Allison.Furbish@KingArthurFlower.com, before Friday with some information about your blog and your social media, your audiences, why you'd like to be here with us, and all of those kinds of things. I've already received a bunch of entries, so thanks. And we'll be assessing the candidates and making a decision on Friday, and we'll let everybody know then. So I hope that you'll enter if you have an interest in joining us in Vermont this spring. We cover all of the expenses except for your travel, so we'll pay for your lodging and meals while you're here, and of course your classes. You just have to get yourself here. So if you're interested, go ahead and email me. And I think with that, I will turn it over to Matt. We're happy to answer questions throughout as well, so please go ahead and post them if you have them. So Matt from Time in Our Kitchen attended Blog and Bake last year, and it was great to have him here. He did some wonderful work on his blog around what he learned here, and I'm happy to have him share it with you tonight. So thanks again, Matt, and take it away.

Alright, thank you, Allison, and thank you, Chef Dennis, and welcome to everybody to my kitchen. I wish I could see all of you and participated, but I do want to make sure that you're able to ask questions as well. So I know Chef Dennis Littley and Alison are watching for those, so please. It's been a lot of fun this year, especially after attending last year, to some of the bloggers that I know that have been invited to answer some of their questions and to provide some feedback on some things that I learned last year, so I'm excited to be able to share some of that with you tonight. But if you have any specific questions, feel free to send them on to Chef Dennis Littley and Alison, and I would be happy to answer them here tonight too. So before I get into my demonstration, I just wanted to introduce myself a little bit and tell a little bit about my experience last year at Blog and Bake as well. Again, my name is Matt Weber. I've been blogging at Time in Our Kitchen for almost 3 years now. It's just a part-time, I do it for fun. No relation to my, my real-life job, so it's just fun for me to spend time in the kitchen, and I enjoy the baking especially. And so that's really a great connection for me to King Arthur. I've always loved using their products, and a great connection when Allison connected with me last year and I was able to attend the event. Some of the highlights for me for the event was number one, really just being able to connect in person with a brand. Having talked with Allison and talking with people on Twitter, it's just fun to connect that face-to-face and in-person relationship. One of the things that we were able to do while we visited King Arthur is to visit their customer support center and be able to meet some of those people, those grandmas that answer the phone when you call in at a Saturday afternoon with questions on your bread or something that you're making. You're able to really meet them in person and to experience that. It was a great opportunity. And as well, the connection with other bloggers. For me, I haven't done a lot of other events, and so it was a great opportunity to really be able to connect in person with other bloggers and create some great relationships that we've been able to connect after the event as well. So that was a lot of fun. As well, one of the neat things for me too was just seeing the difference in skill levels in the different bloggers that attended. For me, I bake a lot. I was just telling Alison and Chef Dennis before we started, I go through over 50 pounds of flour a month. I bake a lot. We make all our own bread. I'm in here all the time making different things. But there were some of the bloggers and other people that attended that very rarely had baked before. So it was fun to see that connection and to experience those, experience those classes with those different people and to be able to learn different things together. There's a lot of things that I still learn from the classes. One of my favorites was when we first got there, we actually sat down and went through a recipe writing class. So we created a simple recipe and we had to write and develop the recipe and then have it critiqued by a professional recipe writer. So that was a lot of fun. Again, just the skills that I learned were, was a great experience for me to be able to be there. And then also we were able to visit the test kitchen there at King Arthur Flour, and that was awesome just to see the different things that they were making and testing different recipes and all their different versions and all the things all over the wall that they were playing with and experimenting for the different mixes and things that King Arthur Flour does. So a lot of fun overall, great experience, a beautiful area. They just barely opened their, their new baking center there in Vermont, and so it's really fun to see that. I am going to start my demonstration. This is one of the recipes we actually learned there in one of the classes that we attended. It was one of my favorites. It's the Blitz Puff Pastry. I've spent a lot of time making puff pastry before, and for those of you that have have done it as well, you understand how much time in laminating the dough and refrigerating it and making layer after layer to make your different pastries. And so I admit I was pretty skeptical about the results. I didn't think it was going to be as good, but it was a great class and it was a great experience, and I use this recipe all the time now. I actually got home late tonight, only about 2 hours ago, and I already created 3 different batches of them for my test tonight. So it, it goes really quickly and they— you can make so many different things with it. So I'm going to jump in and show you some of the tips and things that I learned during the class there. So I'm starting off here with a— in a medium bowl, I'm mixing together my flour, salt, and baking powder. Simple ingredients. That's all we've got in here. And then we've got 1 cup of cold butter. The key with this recipe is having the chilled butter. As we go through each of these steps, I'm gonna go through it pretty quickly, and so the butter is gonna stay chilled. If you're taking time or if you're doing this in the summer, as your butter starts to get soft, you're gonna want to put it back in the fridge and chill it back and forth. And we're gonna do a lot of chilling anyway, but you're gonna want to keep, keep track of that as you're playing with this butter, making sure you— it's staying solid in there. So I'm gonna start about half a cup at a time. I'm cutting these up into small wedges and adding them individually to my flour. And one of the things that we talked about, I know some of the participants from last year are in here as well, is the key in here is visible butter. When we're making our pastry and when we create the dough in the end, we wanna see those butter chunks throughout the dough. So what I'm gonna do, instead of using a pastry blender, which I typically do when I'm making a pie, pie dough, or some other kind of pastry. I'm actually going to use my hands in this and really feel the dough. So I'm going to take each of those squares and all I'm going to do instead of mixing them in, I'm going to take those squares between my thumb and fingers and just press them out into a flat square. Just take them through, I'm going to go through each one here, just press them out. You're going to lightly cover them in flour and you're going to get these large flat discs. Throughout the dough. And what that's gonna do is create, as you mix in your cream here in a minute, even when you start mixing this, it's gonna stay in really large chunks throughout the dough. So I'm gonna mix in my whole cup of butter like that. Again, just, I do it in half because as you go through this, you're inevitably gonna start breaking up some of those larger chunks. So as you do it in two halves, you're gonna keep some large pieces of butter throughout this. So as I go through there, I'm gonna get that nice and mixed in. Following that, you're gonna dump it out. It's not gonna come ever— it really in the bowl ever into a solid mass like it would even with like a pie pastry. So it's gonna be pretty loose and crumbly. You're gonna dump that out and just mix it together with your hands just until it comes into a ball. You're gonna flatten that out into a disc. Again, doing this pretty quickly so it stays chilled. And then you're gonna wrap that in plastic and chill it for about 30 minutes. Once you do that, you're gonna roll that large piece out into an 8x10 rectangle, right here. So I've already got one rolled out for ya. So, and I wish I could show you this in more definition, but as I'm holding this up here, you can see marbled all the way throughout this dough, the large pieces of butter still. So even as I've rolled this out and mixed it together, you can still see that butter all throughout, and that's really what's going to make those layers, where in your traditional puff pastries you're laminating that butter in. That's how you're getting those layers. And so we want to work this as little as possible, so even though we're doing it quickly and not the traditional method, we're still going to get those flaky layers as we bake them. So once you get it into your first 8x10 rectangle— you know what, I was going to turn that off, sorry, before I got started there. So there you can see a little bit better here down on my counter now. Um, so I've got an 8 by 10 rectangle. I'm going to fold that into thirds just like you were folding a letter. So just fold it loosely right over itself. You're going to flip that over and I'm going to roll that into one more 8 by 10 rectangle. So this is, again, if you've done puff pastry ever before, this is where you're going to start getting these layers in here. We're not going to do it as much as a traditional puff pastry just because We really don't need to when we're not doing the, the whole butter cube that you would normally laminate into this. I'm going to do that quickly into another 8x10 rectangle.

Keeping—

you're going to need— you want to keep it as lightly floured as you can, but you don't want to stick either. With those large chunks of butter, it's going to stick pretty easily. So I'm going to get that into one more 8x10 rectangle. And then fold it into thirds one more time. You're gonna press that together into a nice square, and we're gonna wrap that up again and get it back in the fridge to chill it one more time. Now once we've done that, this makes quite a bit of puff pastry too. We're gonna divide that after it's chilled for 30 minutes. We're gonna cut it into half. You can use both of them right away, or you can freeze one as well, which I'm gonna plenty to freeze tonight. So once you've cut it in half, you're gonna roll that half out into an 8 by 12 rectangle. So it's gonna get thinner and thinner here. You can see my rectangle here. I'm gonna take a coarse sugar. You can use any, any type you like. And this is actually a fun part of the class too. We actually experimented with some different fillings. So we used a pesto for one. This makes it— this puff pastry is really pretty versatile. You can do it in sweet or savory, whatever you're looking for. And so, especially with your two halves, you can really mix it up and play around with it. Especially for appetizers, it makes— I mean, you can make some quick versions of pretty much anything. So I'm going to sprinkle sugar all over this one. Now what you're going to do to create the palmiers here is I'm going to start from each side, from the long side, and you can either fold it over in about half-inch increments, or I just typically kind of slowly roll it up. I'm going to get to about halfway through, and then I'm going to start from the other side. So we're going to go side to side, right to the middle, rolling it up here. So you can see I meet here in the middle with both rolls. Then I'm gonna flip it over and just kind of press it so it creates a nice solid roll. And you can see both rolls, kind of from both sides there. So I'm gonna take this and I'm gonna cut them in about half-inch increments. You can do a little bit thicker or thinner if you like. They do melt out quite a bit. Again, you've got a lot of butter in there. So I'm gonna take those. Put them right on your cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. I kind of press them down so they seal together a little bit here on the cookie sheet. And then, of course, we're gonna sprinkle them with a little bit more sugar here. Then all you do is bake these at 400°— 400° for about 10 to 12 minutes. And they come out beautiful, just like this. And the great thing about these is, I mean, you can see it here. I'll eat one right in front of you. But as you see it here, I mean, they practically dissolve right in your fingers. And you can just see the butter and flaky layers in there. And we did that in about 20 minutes total work time. It's gonna take a little bit more time with your chilling. But again, I created 3 batches of these in about 2 hours tonight, so where your traditional puff pastry is gonna take at least a day or 2 to create. So a lot of fun. Again, it's very versatile. A lot of things you can do with it. And of course they're delicious, so that's why it's my favorite recipe from the classes there. So Chef, I'd love— if anyone has any specific questions now, I'd love to answer any questions or people want to submit some, I can.

Well, Matt, I have, I have a question for you. Is that the first time you ever made puff pastry dough when you went to the Blog and Bake? You had never done anything like that before?

I had done the traditional puff pastry where it takes the hours where you're laminating in that butter package and making croissants and things like that. So I've done it. Of course, I've only done it once or twice because I've It takes forever, and it's definitely not worth it when I can go to Costco and buy them for $5. So I had never done a blitz puff pastry like this. So again, that's why I was so skeptical when we were signing up for the class and going in there. But great results.

I can see that. I mean, I think it's amazing that you can make something like that. I would love to learn how to make it. I mean, I was watching you like a hawk while you were doing that, trying to soak up as much as I can. Because I know the puff pastry you get at the store is good, but nothing can compare to something you make at home. I mean, it really— and to be able to make it that quick, and the fact that you can freeze it, is just excellent.

Yeah, there's really no reason to ever get those sheets of puff pastry. I mean, it's so simple where you can create so much of this and just freeze it anyway.

Very good. Were there other recipes or anything that you took away away from the Blog and Bake that really excited you?

You know, even we did a class on bread making, and it was interesting just to get— of course, I'm not a professional by any means. I've been making bread for a long time, but just to get that instruction and aspect from a professional bread maker, someone that's doing it, they know the differences, and we did some experiments with different flours and understanding how that impacts your bread. And we did everything by hand there, which is very interesting. We never used a mixer, and I use a mixer all the time at home, but they really taught you to feel it and to know, especially with that bread. And that, that's really important, especially for people that haven't been making bread before, to really understand the feel of your dough of knowing when it's ready, not putting in too much flour, not having it too sticky. And so it was great just to receive that instruction, to see and get that experience, even if I've been doing it for a long time myself.

We did have a question too, and I was looking to see who had asked it, but it was about the freezing of the puff pastry. And is there anything special you need to do to defrost it? After you freeze it or defreeze it?

I typically put it back in the fridge. I don't let it sit out. I found when I did that, it tends to get some moisture in it. So I let it sit in the fridge overnight, and then I typically just roll it out. It's soft enough then, and it's chilled, so it doesn't get too soft that way.

Good to know. And what's your favorite thing to make with it, though?

I'd have to say it's these palmiers.

The palmiers? They look great. They really do. I was jealous watching you crack one. I thought you were going to eat it.

Well, I sent my family out for the night too, so they do not have to know that I made this entire batch.

So—

That's great. Allison, is there anything you would like to ask Matt now?

Well, I was actually going to add that my favorite thing to make with this dough is raspberry or blackberry turnovers, and the great thing about this dough is, you know, just how versatile it is. So this is one of my favorite blog and bake recipes, and it is on the schedule for this year again. So yeah, Matt, thanks for the great demo. Everybody really liked it. I don't know if you can see the comments right now. And the palmiers look fabulous. So I know that some people, you know, may think that coming to King Arthur Flour to learn baking from us could be a giant commercial from King Arthur Flour, and I hope that Matt has been able to reassure you that this is really all about baking education. It's not about, I mean obviously we want to introduce you to our brand and hope that you choose to, you know, purchase it over others, but it's really about learning how to bake and, you know, learning some new skills that you can share with your audiences. And Matt obviously has mastered that.

We did have a few questions about gluten-free products and if you do anything gluten-free up at the blog and bake, or if you've used any in your kitchens there? Matt, how about— have you used any gluten-free products?

I honestly have never cooked gluten-free in my life, so I have not. I know one of the things that we did do there though, I talked about before that we experimented with the different flours. So one of the instructors had used the same muffin recipe in various different flours, and so we could see that one of them was using their gluten-free recipe, their gluten-free flour, sorry, gluten-free flours as well. So we did experiment with them a little bit, but I don't, we didn't cook any specific recipes with that. I don't know if that's in the plan for this year either.

And we do have a great line of gluten-free mixes and lots of ingredients, and in fact a number of gluten-free baking experts on staff here at King Arthur Flour, including on our wonderful hotline. We don't focus on any gluten-free baking at Blog Bake, and you know, we know that that is a popular topic. We do offer classes in our baking education center that focus on gluten-free baking, although we aren't a strictly gluten-free facility, but that's not something that we've incorporated at Blog Bake yet, although every year it's an evolving event, so you never know what could happen.

Allison, other than Blog and Bake, does King Arthur Flour do anything else with bloggers throughout the year? Are there any other opportunities for us?

Absolutely, we love working with bloggers, and you know, we consider every inquiry individually, but we're very open to hearing from bloggers, hearing their ideas, and developing ideas to pitch to bloggers. So I'm the primary blogger contact, and if anybody wants to email me about anything beyond Blog and Bake, I encourage that. We love to connect with new people and find new ways to partner. We work primarily around editorial, so we can provide all kinds of recipes, information, experts. We also do a lot of reviews and giveaways, so we can, you know, send product samples and things like that. And of course, we're just always happy to help anybody who wants a little bit of baking education. So I welcome people to email me.

Are there any other classes at your facility besides the Blog and Bake? I mean, like, I couldn't make this one, but I mean, if I wanted to come up for the weekend or the week sometime in the summer when I'm off, are there other opportunities for us to take classes at King Arthur?

Yeah, that's a great question. Thanks for asking. And Matt mentioned our wonderful new headquarters facility, which we are very excited about. We have this beautiful new bakery, store, school, and cafe here in Norwich, Vermont, and we do offer classes nearly every single day for everyone from children right up through professional bakers. We offer everything from, you know, a 2-hour demo to a week-long baking seminar, so we have something for just about everybody, and that's— all of that information is available on our website. Kingarthurflour.com. If you click on About, you can find— or Education, you can find all of that information.

That's great to know. I mean, I know I— baking is just something I love to do, but I really am not a trained baker, and I would love to learn how to make bread properly and some of those techniques that you guys have. So you may be seeing me this summer.

Great, I hope so. And as Matt said, you know, at Blog and Bake and at all of our classes, we really try to accommodate bakers of of all levels, so everybody will be able to learn something new, and that's why at Blog Bake we offer such a range of classes, because we all have our strengths and weaknesses as bakers, but we all, you know, have new things to learn even if we've been baking the same thing time and time again. So, you know, it's really, our school is very open to bakers of all levels and all interests, and that's part of what makes it so much fun. We also have a lot of great guest instructors. We've had Gesine Bullock-Prado and many other well-known bakers, both professional and— both in the professional baking world and, you know, in the kind of consumer baking world. So it's a really fun, fun place to be, and our new bakery is wonderful. You can actually, when you're here at our school, you can peek right into the bakery. We have windows so you can see what our bakers are doing in their shop as well.

So you can actually buy some baked goods while you're there too?

Oh yes, you can buy lots of baked goods. We also have a café that has— so you can get your lunch, your breakfast, your dinner, whatever you need.

I was really bad about bringing in large platters of pastries and just setting them in front of us.

Yes, I seem to recall you had a weakness for the chocolate croissants, Matt.

You're killing me. We did have someone ask about the blitz recipe. Is that going to be available, or could we put that up later?

Oh, absolutely. It's on our website, and I will— I did post it, but I'll just go grab it again now and post it again for people who are looking for it.

I went through it step by step as well on my blog for the top page there too, so if you want to see some more pictures of it.

Sounds good. Alison, talking about flowers, I know, you know, I can't get King Arthur flour where I work. I mean, it's all I use at home, but I can't get it at work. What are the real main differences between your flour and some of the competitors out there?

Great question. We, you know, most people probably are familiar with, if they're familiar with our brand, they probably understand that our flour is unbleached. And unbromated, so we're not adding, you know, junk that you don't really need in your flour. But the real differentiating point is that we have the most consistent standards in the industry for the quality of our product. So every time a baker uses our flour, you know, today, 3 weeks from now, 5 years from now, it's always going to behave the same way in the same recipe. Some of our other competitors can't make that claim, so you might use the same recipe, you know, and and have a failure one time and have a great success another time and be wondering why, and it's because the flour quality isn't there. And so that's something you just don't have to worry about with King Arthur Flour. And then the other, you know, thing that really sets us apart is kind of all of these resources that we've been talking about. We're not just, we like to say, grains in a bag, you know. We have all of, not only the products that you need, but also all of the educational resources. We have cookbooks and a great newsletter. We have the online recipes, our hotline, and just all kinds of recipes to support both home and professional bakers. So, you know, the flour quality is superior, and then we offer a whole host of other resources that home bakers need.

Speaking of cookbooks, you know, I've had a couple of your cookbooks for years, and, you know, even though I'm not that much of a baker and I haven't delved into them, I had I bought them in hopes that they would teach me something. But all those recipes in the cookbooks you compiled, are they done by pretty much your staff, the bakers that you have working for you there?

Yes, exactly. We have a great staff in our test kitchen as well as in our bakery, and our own test bakers develop and test and publish all of the recipes, all of the mixes that we sell, you know, all of the ingredients and tools that we sell are all tested in our test kitchen. So we have quite a crew here, and we actually recently expanded our test kitchen, so it's a, it's a much nicer space than it was, and we'll actually be visiting the test kitchen during Blog and Bake, so the bloggers will get kind of a behind-the-scenes peek at what's happening in there that most people don't get to have.

With your test kitchen, I'm curious, I mean, how do you decide, or what do you What do you test? I mean, to me, with food, I mean, do you get recipes sent to you from bloggers or from people that you want to try them, or do you just develop them, or how does the whole thing work in there?

Yeah, I mean, it's both of those things that you mentioned. You know, people send us ideas and we run with them. We do a lot of research and try to identify what people are looking for, you know, what they're missing and that we could provide. We find great products that we love that inspire us to develop new recipes around them. The inspiration comes from all kinds of places, and that's part of what makes baking so much fun too, is that you can really, you can get an idea and just really run with it. And that's what we do. We have a lot of creative people who do just that every day.

You know, that's really a refreshing way to look at it too, because I don't think I've ever talked to very many companies that say we look outside for ideas, we try to create things that people give to us and work with it. It's just really nice to know that, you know, you're not so wrapped up in yourself that you can't talk to somebody on the outside or get an idea from somebody on the outside and work it and see what you can do with it. You know, that's good to know. That means a lot, like you're really working with the community to make things better.

Well, thank you. That's really what we try to do. We're, you know, we're an employee-owned employee-owned company, and as such, we're very focused on our customers and what they need and want from us and being the best that we can for those people. So it's a pleasure to be able to find the inspiration, you know, from the people who use our products and, and again, you know, continue to provide what they're looking for and provide something unique.

Very much so. When we were talking before, you mentioned some of the opportunities for bloggers. Do you have anything specific that you could tell us about, or is that just things in the works?

Well, you know, our approach is really to kind of work with bloggers individually. I mean, you know, we do develop some campaigns and try to identify specific bloggers to work with on those things, but for the most part, what we do is just kind of work with each person individually rather than coming up with sort of a blanket pitch for a bunch of people. We like to hear from and reach out to individuals with ideas that really match them. So I don't necessarily have, you know, sort of one thing coming up other than Blog and Bake that people can, you know, kind of grab onto, but I love to hear from people and work on unique ideas with them.

So it's okay for them to reach out to you then, and if they have something that they'd like to do or an idea they'd like to run by you, you don't mind hearing from them?

Right. Although with, you know, 100+ people on tonight, if everybody emails me tomorrow, it will probably take me a little while to get back to you, so thank you for your patience in advance.

Well, it's good to know. Matt, can you tell us a little bit more about your experience at Blog and Bake? I know we touched on what you made there. When you stayed in the facility, you stayed in the hotel, did you guys go out as a group? Did you have some camaraderie? I know as bloggers, one of the things we like to do is we like to get together and have a little fun afterwards. Was there any kind of that going on?

Yeah, there actually was quite a bit. For me, this was my first real blogger event that I don't have a lot to compare it back to, but we really did have a lot of opportunities to just spend time with the other bloggers. We all stayed at a beautiful hotel there, more an inn I think than I can say hotel, but a beautiful location. We were able to each evening, I mean there were some other events, we had dinner together at the at the restaurant there with— we actually had Marianne Esposito come in and we taped a live show, not a live show, we taped a show with her and then the chefs actually recreated her meal there, so we were able to do some of that. I know she's— I know Allison's got an event similar to that coming up this year as well. But we really just had, I mean, there were opportunities where we were just able to sit together and to enjoy learning about each other, talking. Again, bloggers come from so many different backgrounds. Some of them are doing it professionally. Most people are just doing it as a side job or part-time. And so it's fun to hear the backstories behind everybody. And then I noticed someone was asking if we keep in touch still. And yeah, I mean, we're in different groups on Facebook or social media, but we certainly still, I see them, we talk to each other, and are involved in helping each other out in different events and things. So definitely long-term relationships that we've made. I think we all keep bugging Alison, after a couple years we're going to do a reunion Blog and Bake, so get everybody that's been there before to come back. So certainly great relationships and good opportunities to get together. With each other.

And I think that's one of the really important parts of the event, you know, is connecting with people. At King Arthur Flour, you know, that's really what baking is about for us, is bringing people together, and what better way to do it than, you know, get a whole bunch of food bloggers here in our school to play with each other in the kitchen, you know, it's fun. And we actually have tried to build in a little bit more time this year for people to just have a bit of downtime. The pace is pretty hectic, or not hectic, but you know, it's a pretty packed schedule that we have. So this year we've tried to allow a little bit more time for people to just socialize and wander around our campus and such. So it'll be very nice. And again, as Matt mentioned, everybody will be staying together at the Norwich Inn, which is less than a mile away from our facility. So it's a very nice little kind of getaway for a few days. I just wanted to quickly say somebody had asked how we, King Arthur Flour, feels about bloggers sharing our recipes on their blogs, and we love it. So you can always feel free to contact me if you have any questions, but we just simply ask if you share our recipe, just give us credit and preferably a link, but you don't need to even really email us for permission. Although we'd love to hear from you.

That's certainly good to know because, you know, there is— with so much going on with bloggers using recipes from other areas, even when we do links, sometimes people tend to get upset. But that's good to know that you're all for it, because really, you know, we're helping each other with this. I mean, if we're making one of your recipes and showing that we did it successfully, other people are going to be as anxious to make it themselves. So that's good.

Exactly, and we just want to inspire people to bake, so there you have it.

Well, you definitely give true meaning to the word breaking bread, okay, with your blog and bake. So, you know, I'm almost— I'm really sorry now, not almost, I'm really sorry now that I couldn't take advantage of your invitation to come up for that.

I'm sorry too. Maybe we'll have an event that is outside of the normal school year sometimes. So you can join us.

Well, I've only got one or two more years at school before I retire, so there's always time after that too.

Perfect.

Okay, well, we've covered quite a bit. I'm looking to see if there were any other questions. One was, how many bloggers will attend this year's event?

There will be 16 people at this year's event, and that's actually the maximum capacity for our classroom for a typical hands-on class. So it's a very nice small size, not only for getting to know each other, but, you know, so that you get the hands-on attention that you need from our instructors. So there's actually in the classroom, there's a ratio of 16 students to 2 instructors, which is pretty good.

Wow, that is good. Alright, we just had a question on one of the points that you had put in the About section. How do they enter to win the gift certificates or the gift cards to King Arthur Flour that we talked about? There were, I think, 3 of those you were going to give away.

Yeah, we talked about that right before we got on and realized that I didn't have a plan for selecting those. I think that what I'm going to do is just kind of go through the comments and randomly select some people to win the gift cards, and also I'll give away a handful of coupons for free bags of flour in the supermarket. So I will choose some winners and notify them in the comments. Great, thank you. I'm sorry, Matt, what was that?

If they all end up being for me, that's okay.

No, so Matt's not eligible and neither am I, so don't worry. So if you haven't left a comment, okay, you want a chance to win those, get in there now and leave some comments before we break away and that will give you an opportunity to win one of those gift cards or a bag of flour and see what you can do with it. And Allison, if they do make something with the flour flower, and they let you know about it. Do you ever take bloggers' recipes then, or pictures of work they've done?

Well, we don't use guest blogs and recipes as a general rule, but you know, again, we do take inspiration and give credit where credit is due. So, you know, if we see something that somebody's done that we especially like, we may be able to use that in some way. We also try to support people who are using our products and promoting them by sharing through social media. So we're always happy to retweet posts that mention us, or even just great baking posts. So yeah, we're happy to work with people that way, and we always love to see what you're doing with our flour.

Great. Maybe then as time goes on, we can hope to see a King Arthur Flour community on Google+ where we can talk, some of your bakers or some to take a turn every now and then going in there and answering questions or talking about some of those things.

Yeah, I love that idea. And now that you've helped bring us into the Google+ community, Chef Dennis, I think we might be braver about venturing further into that territory.

That's good. I would love to see that. And you know, the people on Google+ really are amazing. We're getting more and more bloggers coming on all the time, and there's so many people that just love food. I think that's really the one common denominator that everyone has, and it just seems a lot friendlier than Facebook or Twitter. I know we need all the social medias, but this is definitely a place where we could sit around and talk about things a lot more than on some of the other social medias. I think with your— the way you run King Arthur Flour and your ideas and towards social media and towards bloggers and towards everything in general, it's a good match for you guys. I can see a community in your future.

I'll be happy to. The Hangouts are just such a fun way to be able to reach people. I mean, we can't bring everybody into our school, but we can invite everybody to do something like this with us. Now that we've proven we can do it, you never know. I think we'll try to maybe start doing some classes this way from time to time.

Well, it's funny you say that because someone had asked about online classes, if that was a possibility. So there you go.

Yeah, we do have some kind of walk yourself through online tutorials on our website that people can find there. But we haven't done anything interactive like this yet. I'm hoping that we will be able to in the near future.

That would be great. Well, I'm looking for any more questions. If anybody's got anything they'd like to ask before we do sign off. We've covered about giving away the gift cards and then the bags of flour that you may be able to win by leaving comments. And we talked about Blog and Bake, and also there's going to be a winner picked for that, and I think Alison, you You said by Friday you would know, or—

Yep, we're going to select the winner on Friday, and after we've notified the winner, we will share it on Google+ and we'll of course let you know so that you can announce it as well.

Great, great. I'll be excited to hear who's going. I mean, I already know some bloggers from the area that are going. They've been talking about it on Google+ to see who else was going to be able to attend. That's going to be a really nice event. The fact that you've only got 16 makes it really even more special because you get a chance to really interact and really work. The smaller events are just a lot better than some you go to that you just get lost in the shuffle at. This sounds like a really nice time. I noticed too you have some amazing photographs of your products. Who takes those?

You know, it's actually, depending on where you see them, it could be a number of different people. We have a really big team. We have, you know, of course a professional photographer with a studio who takes photographs for our catalog and our baking subscription newsletter, but we have some really talented employee owners who take pictures for, you know, Facebook and Instagram, and it's just fabulous that we have so many people who are, you know, really passionate about baking, doing it all the time, and able to take such great photos of what they're doing.

They are. I see them on there, and it's just a no-brainer to share it because the stuff looks so good. I really get even more jealous when I see them because here you have these beautiful baked products and these great photographs of them. I'm going, "Oh, I don't know." Colleen Levine just thanked you. "Your website and recipes are such a great resource. Can't wait to make it to a class. And we had a lot of thanks for the Hangouts. And we did have another couple questions about the other slots, if they were all full at this time.

Okay, so we actually do— we have filled up the slots. We— what we do is we kind of develop a list by hand of bloggers that we want to invite. So we, we started inviting people, you know, months ago, and this was just kind of a special thing that Chef Dennis, you had this wonderful idea, so thank you again for coming up with this. So we wanted to take this special opportunity to, you know, to maybe connect with somebody we otherwise wouldn't have discovered. But, you know, again, I think we do enjoy working with people, and so even though, you know, only one person can win this invitation, we— I will be reaching out to everybody who contacts me to build a relationship and, you know, perhaps get you on the list for next year.

So absolutely. I mean, now there's people know about this, and that— because honestly, I'd never heard about it before you could contact me too. So now we have a whole new set of people that know about Blog and Bake and that are going to be very anxious for that invitation. So I think you're going to get a lot more interaction from people, and it's great because, you know, the more people know about it, the more it's gonna work for you and it's gonna work for us. And who knows, maybe you'll have to throw another one in, a second one in sometime to get enough. We also had a couple questions from some of our Canadian friends. They said, you know, they know they can't get it in their stores right now up there, but you have no problem mail ordering things to them, do you?

No, absolutely. We'll ship anywhere, so just contact us. And in fact, we've tried to make make the shipping a little bit more bearable for our Canadian customers. So definitely, you know, if you have any issues placing your order online, just call our customer service team and we're happy to work with you.

Very good. All right, I think unless anybody has anything else, that looks like it's going to wrap it up. We don't have any more questions. Everybody's just excited and anxious to come back in and send you a few more emails about entering for that slot so they can be considered for it. Matt, is there anything else you'd like to say before we go?

No, I just really enjoyed it. Again, if anyone has any specific questions, I know Allison would be happy to answer them, but if you have anything specific you want to know about the experience, I'd be happy to send you a message.

Great. Allison, any last words?

Well, I just want to thank you, Dennis Littley and Matt Littley, for helping us pull this together and make it so successful tonight. And Matt, thank you for being a resource for people who are interested in Blog and Bake. I think this has been a really great event, and we are really excited about Blog and Bake. We're excited about this Hangout, and I'm so glad that so many people have been here and been so active and so interested. So thank you to everybody who joined us tonight.

I know it was our pleasure to be on with you tonight, Alison and Matt, and to watch everything. Matt, I'm still amazed with that that blitz puff pastry. If it wasn't so late, I'd likely go in the kitchen right now and start doing it, but 4 o'clock in the morning comes way too early for me to do that. But I'd like to thank everyone for coming. It's always good to have everybody here. You know, our Google+ community is growing all the time, and it's good to see so many bloggers coming together and having fun together. And Alison, thank you very much for all you've done for our community. Community already, and I'm sure moving forward we're going to have a very good partnership. I agree.

Thank you.

That's about it for tonight. I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and thank you for stopping by. I'll see you soon.

Good night.

Good night.