• Improve someone’s mind, gut microbiome & sourdough baking skills this Christmas with the gift of Vanessa’s long-awaited The Sourdough School: Sweet Baking book, the sequel to the best-selling The Sourdough School .

Sweet Sourdough is ideal for anyone who is already interested in baking or fermenting, wanting to improve gut health, mental health or wanting to advance their knowledge of working with sourdough.

The Sourdough School: Sweet Baking Nourishing the Gut and Mind is an indispensable guide to exploring the techniques and ingredients involved in successful sweet sourdough baking.

Nigella is a huge fan of Vanessa’s work, as she introduces the book on the front cover, as is Professor Tim Spector, who wrote the foreword about Vanessa’s cutting edge application of the latest research.  This book has taken over three years of intense research, and it has been worth the wait.  Pick up sweet sourdough and you will learn to ferment bake and eat delicious sweet sourdough bakes. But this is beyond just baking.  it is about understanding and you will discover how to bake to bolster the gut microbiome and how this approach combining specific prebiotic & Probiotic ingredients can improve the gut divercity and balance and positively affect mental health.

A companion to the bestselling The Sourdough School it focuses on sweet recipes that are gut-friendly and rely on natural sweetness where possible.

Classic recipes and new ideas for flavour combinations offer bakers an alternative method of baking cakes, tarts, pancakes, doughnuts, panettones, pretzels – nothing is off limits. If it rises, it can be made with sourdough.

These sweet bakes are made from the sourdough starter that is most commonly discarded by bakers, so the book offers a solution for people keen to reduce waste and make the most of the time spent caring for their starter.

Also featured are recipes for compotes and syrups to accompany your bakes. Vanessa also explains how sourdough helps to maintain the health and diversity of your gut microbiome, which in turn improves mental health.

New studies are unveiling links between the microorganisms in our gut and our mood and behaviour, and Vanessa is at the forefront of this research.

The book is perfect for all manner of sourdough baking enthusiasts and each copy comes with a signed book plate. £25 from our stockist

• Many people coped with stresses of the first half of the year by getting in the kitchen. Kneading and working dough is extremely therapeutic. People choose to go back to simple things in life to nourish them and their mental health.

So, what better gift to ensure your special baker can learn more; be it your partner, Dad, brother, than a voucher for a membership to The Sourdough Club.

Joining the club is about far more than baking bread because Vanessa will teach your loved one baking bread that nourishes is one of the most powerful ways we can disrupt the system.