about us



Welcome to Juliette's Bakes

JuliettesBakes.com is a baking website built on classical pastry training and dedicated entirely to home bakers. Every recipe here — from delicate choux and laminated doughs to celebration cakes and simple everyday biscuits — is developed from a professional foundation and tested with the specific conditions of a domestic kitchen in mind.

Baking is a discipline that rewards knowledge. The more you understand about how ingredients behave and why techniques matter, the more reliable and creative you become as a baker. This site exists to pass that knowledge on — drawn from years of professional training and kitchen experience, translated into recipes and explanations that are genuinely clear and consistently dependable.

Nothing here is published until it has been baked multiple times, across multiple conditions. The standard is simple: if it does not work reliably in a home oven, it does not go on the site.

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Juliette Marsh

Pastry Chef & Recipe Developer

Juliette trained in professional patisserie at Ferrandi Paris, one of the most respected culinary schools in France, completing a full programme in pastry arts with a focus on classical French technique — from tart and pâte work to entremets, petits fours, and the fundamentals of bread and viennoiserie. After returning to the UK, she spent five years working in professional kitchens: first as a pastry commis in a Michelin-recognised London restaurant, then as a pastry chef de partie at a boutique hotel in the Cotswolds with a strong baking and afternoon tea programme.

Those years gave her a working knowledge of what professional pastry actually demands — the discipline, the precision, and the understanding of how small variables produce large differences in result. They also gave her something equally important: a clear sense of the gap between how baking is taught in a professional setting and what home bakers actually need to know. Closing that gap honestly is the work this site is built around.

The Bake That Stayed With Me

Juliette's professional training gave her technique. One afternoon during her time at Ferrandi gave her something harder to teach.


It was a Thursday in her second term, and the class had been set a deceptively simple task: produce a perfectly laminated croissant dough and bake a full tray to a standard that Chef Lavigne — an exacting, compact man who had spent twenty years in Parisian boulangeries — would consider presentable. The class had done the same dough twice before. Juliette felt, going in, that she understood it.

She did not. Her butter block was fractionally too cold when she began laminating, and she felt the resistance in the dough but pressed on anyway. The result — after three hours of work and an overnight proof — was a tray of croissants that were compact, dense, and layerless in the cross-section. Not inedible. But not right. Chef Lavigne cut one open, set it on the bench in front of her without speaking, and walked away. The lesson was entirely in that silence and that cross-section: the dough had told her something was wrong before she ever put it in the oven, and she had ignored it because she did not yet know how to listen. Every baking tutorial and recipe explanation Juliette writes today begins from that lesson — the idea that understanding what the dough is communicating at each stage is the most transferable skill a baker can develop.

Why JuliettesBakes.com Exists

After leaving full-time kitchen work to raise her family, Juliette found herself surrounded by home bakers — friends, family, people in her local community — who were frustrated by recipes that did not explain enough, failed without obvious reason, or assumed a level of equipment and ingredient access that most households do not have.

She also found a large amount of online baking content that used professional-sounding language without the professional grounding behind it — recipes presented with confidence that had clearly not been tested rigorously, and advice given without an understanding of why the technique actually works.

JuliettesBakes.com was her answer to both problems. It is a site where the professional background is real and verifiable, the recipes are tested to a standard she would have been held to in a working kitchen, and the explanations are written with enough depth that a home baker can genuinely understand what they are doing — not just follow instructions and hope for the best.

Professional Background & Experience

  • Professional pastry arts qualification from Ferrandi Paris, with a focus on classical French technique
  • Training in tart and pâte work, entremets, petits fours, viennoiserie, and bread baking fundamentals
  • Five years of professional kitchen experience across Michelin-recognised and boutique hotel environments
  • Worked as pastry commis and pastry chef de partie in high-standard professional pastry sections
  • Extensive hands-on experience with laminated doughs, choux pastry, and celebration cake construction
  • Professional background in afternoon tea programming — a discipline requiring consistent, high-volume baking
  • Recipe development for home baking audiences, with an emphasis on domestic adaptability and reliability
  • Ongoing study in sourdough, heritage grains, and the science of fermentation-leavened baking

Baking Philosophy

  • Learn to read the dough — it communicates at every stage, and that skill transfers to every recipe you will ever bake
  • Professional technique is the most useful thing a home baker can acquire; this site exists to share it honestly
  • A recipe is only finished when it is reliable, not just when it is written
  • Every recipe must be written for a domestic oven and realistic home kitchen conditions — not for the professional equipment the author trained on
  • Understanding why something works is more durable than memorising how to do it
  • Precision in baking is not fussiness — it is respect for the chemistry involved
  • Failure, properly explained, teaches more than success left unexamined
  • Baking should build confidence over time; a good recipe leaves you more capable than you were before you made it

Recipe Testing and Why You Can Trust These Recipes

The testing process at Juliette's Bakes is designed to catch every point of failure before a recipe reaches you. Baking is unforgiving in ways that general cooking is not — small errors in ratio, temperature, or technique compound into outcomes that are very different from what was intended. The testing process here takes that seriously.

01

Professional Foundation

Every recipe originates from Juliette's formal pastry training and professional kitchen experience. Ratios, structure, and technique are grounded in classical methods, then specifically adapted for domestic conditions — not simply transferred unchanged from a professional context.

02

Repeated Testing

Each recipe is baked a minimum of three times before publication. Variables including butter fat content, flour protein levels, ambient temperature, and oven calibration are tested and noted. Points of sensitivity are identified and addressed explicitly in the recipe method.

03

Failure Guidance Included

Where a bake is prone to going wrong in a particular way, the recipe includes clear guidance on what to watch for, what causes the problem, and how to correct or avoid it. Home bakers should not encounter a failed bake and have no idea why it happened.

All recipes are tested in a standard domestic fan oven and a conventional oven, with notes provided where the two behave differently. Ingredient quantities are always given by weight in grams — the only reliable measure for consistent results — alongside cup and spoon equivalents where relevant. Everything is written for a home kitchen, not for the professional environments Juliette trained and worked in.

Who This Site Is For

  • Home bakers who want recipes that deliver reliable, repeatable results — not just one lucky bake
  • Anyone who has had a carefully followed recipe fail with no explanation of what went wrong
  • Bakers at any level who want to understand the technique behind what they are making, not just follow steps
  • Beginners looking for a trustworthy, professionally grounded place to build real skills from the start
  • Experienced home bakers who want classically trained recipes that will genuinely challenge and develop them
  • People who bake for others and need recipes they can trust when it matters — celebrations, gifts, occasions
  • Anyone drawn to French pastry and classical baking traditions, written for home kitchen conditions
  • Bakers who value honesty — about difficulty level, timing, what can go wrong, and why

A Note From Juliette

I trained in Paris, worked in professional kitchens for five years, and then stepped away from that world to focus on my family. What I kept from those years — and what I bring to every recipe I write — is a standard. Not a professional standard imposed on home bakers, but a professional understanding of what good baking actually requires, translated honestly for the kitchen most people are actually cooking in.

Everything on this site is an attempt to give you that. Not as a shortcut, not as entertainment, but as genuinely useful knowledge that will make you a more capable and confident baker over time.

If something here does not work as described, or if an explanation is not clear enough, please tell me. The only thing this site is for is being useful to you, and I take that seriously every time I publish something new.



— Juliette