Artisan baker Ann Cudworth makes a crust from the bread making workshops she runs from home. She's on a mission to inspire a new nation of home bakers. KATHARINE CAPOCCI went to meet her

She says: “I like the small numbers and keeping it intimate. And besides, you run out of oven space. Six at each workshop is about the maximum.”

The workshops, which cost from £50 for a half-day taster to £75 for a day course, are kept small and personal to ensure participants have a great baking experience with plenty of one-to-one tuition.

Full-day participants start the day with coffee at 9.30am and baking begins at 10am, there’s a break for lunch, then the workshop continues until 3pm.

Upcoming classes include Introduction to Breadmaking, sourdough workshops, Italian bread-making and pizza classes.

And Ann says there’s always plenty of bread to take home.

Ann has been baking for many years and her earliest childhood memories are of the aroma of freshly baked bread made by her mother, back home in Kilkenny in southern Ireland.

Ann comes from a large Catholic family and grew up with six sisters and one brother. “I grew up on a small farm but the family was big! We used to run home for lunch. And we’d have tea and soda bread in the evening. We would fight over the crust, the prized piece!”

She trained as a nurse in Ireland, came to Leeds to do midwifery and then went to Zimbabwe where she worked as a midwife in a mission hospital. That’s where she met her husband-to-be Phil who was working as a doctor, and whose family hail from Rochdale. And their daughter Leisha was born in Zimbabwe.

The family have been settled in the North East since 1991, where Ann did bank nursing at Rake Lane hospital as a midwife.

Ann likes to support local when she can and sources some of her flours from Gilchesters at Stamfordham in Northumberland, where the grains are grown on the organic farm and stone-ground in the mill.

She is a big fan of their spelt flour, a strong bread making flour with good quality gluten and an intense flavour, the ciabatta pizza flour and white farmhouse flour.

“They are lovely quality and I like to support local. I believe in supporting local when I can.

“My eggs come from Shirley, ‘the eggs lady’ at Haydon Bridge.”

I can’t help but notice the outdoor wood-fired oven from the French doors off her kitchen into her back yard. That looks like a serious piece of kitchen kit.

“We use it when we go to the market and I bake sourdoughs in there. We have done chicken in there. And pizzas are done in nano seconds!”

Ann has been baking bread as a business for about six years, starting out as Auroan (pronounced ‘our own’, and a play on the Gaelic word for bread, ‘arain’). Her Dough Works venture has been in existence now for about 18 months.

“I have always loved baking. I left work, I decided to start on the baking side to see if I could make a go of it.”

Baking is a joy to Ann and she loves passing on the skills needed to produce delicious real breads to others. “When you mix it up it’s a shaggy mess, and then you see the dough take shape. And there’s the tactile bit.”