Rose Prince's Baking Club: How my children earn their crust The suggestion that they should sell something they make, because it would be more original than washing cars, was met with grunts of assent. Six months passed. We had decided to trade on something the supermarkets cannot make: slowly leavened, handmade sourdough bread with character. The problem was, I hadn't a clue about the sourdough process. Making sourdough bread is like making wine. You must feel, and smell, your way through the process using a living, breathing leaven. I tried to make my own fermentation. Within two weeks it smelled like a rotting mouse. A friend then gave me a pot with a suspect grey bubbling liquid inside it. I failed to keep it happy and, like a fairground goldfish, it was dead in a month. Then, in September 2010, the Pocket Bakery found its sourdough guru when we met Giuseppe Mascoli, originator of the now famous Brixton Market pizzeria, Franco Manca. Mascoli, born in Positano, near Naples, is a former lecturer at the London School of Economics who gave up teaching to invest time and money in his real love - food. The sourdough pizzas at Franco Manca are made from organic ingredients and yeast Mascoli obtained from a bakery in Amalfi. This "barm" is creamy-coloured and smells sweetly fruity and ripe, not acrid like the horrible pot of lava I had previously attempted to nurture. Mascoli told me the original yeasts were known to date back to 1790. "Possibly even Roman times - there are some very powerful yeasts in there," he said, giving the fledgling bakery a small piece in early November. Jack and Lara intended to open every Saturday morning. Because the sour dough needs 16 hours to rise, the dough had to be made on Friday afternoon, after school. Mascoli offered a lesson that first Friday, enthused by the idea of children starting a bakery. I bought salt, a thermometer and three giant plastic containers. We ordered our flour from Stoate & Sons, of Cann watermill in Dorset. Michael Stoate stone-mills organic British wheat into the flour I now believe to be the best in the world. I had visited the mill for the first time 10 years ago and used a photograph of its amazing interior in my first book. Although my son Jack, then aged six, got his finger stuck under a millstone when we visited; it had a squashed appearance for weeks. Stoate sells flour in 8kg or 32kg bags and delivered on the morning of the Pocket Bakery's first day of production. At 5pm, Giuseppe Mascoli arrived on his motorbike, with a pot of the sourdough yeast and his saddlebags weighed down by four rectangular, fireproof ceramic tiles which we slid into my oven. The workforce, however, immediately went Awol. At the last minute, Lara telephoned to say she wanted to spend the evening with a friend. Jack feigned a tiny bit of interest, wandering in and out of the kitchen. I spent the evening mixing the dough, listening to a hurried lecture from Mascoli about the science of sourdough, uncertain how much I was taking in. By the morning, there were 12 swollen lumps of dough, each wrapped in a floured cloth. "The French call this couche, because the dough 'sleeps" over night," Mascoli said. Next morning, unable to use the baker's paddle to place the bread on the stones in the oven, I used baking sheets and burned half of it. Again the children were out, completely uninspired. At close of business, I waved £24 in front of them, then pocketed it. That was the roughly guessed profits from the first day (the bread sells at £3 for a 700g loaf). The following Friday, Jack and Lara came straight back from school, not wanting to miss out on the loot this time. They made the dough, shaped and wrapped it, then both did a leaflet drop to houses in the area. "We only put leaflets through doors with lights on inside, because we knew they'd be in the next day," said Lara. A decent on-the-spot survey, I thought, and was then very amused when they told me they had looked through neighbours" windows "to see if they were the 'types" that would buy artisan bread." That week, the bread was wonderful: ripe-flavoured but not sour. The chewy crumb of the white was in fact a dark buff colour, down to the natural oils in Stoate's extraordinary flour. We all became proficient as pizzaioli (professional pizza chefs) with the paddle. We sold most of the bread, and the children earned £18 each. With a second leaflet drop the following week, the customer base of neighbours grew. It is appalling to admit, having lived in the house for 16 years, how few people we knew. Within weeks, we had 20 regulars and another 30 who popped in on occasional Saturdays. We are, we discovered, surrounded by remarkable people who are devoted to the tiny bakery and love to buy handmade, additive-free bread. One family, who live in Camberwell, take extra loaves for neighbours in their own street - we call them the South East Sales Division. Some customers have walked in off the street, following their noses. Others have been persuaded to buy by the children, whose sales skills are powerful. Jack once sold two loaves to Jehovah's Witnesses who knocked on the door. A year and a bit on, we have settled into a routine where the bakery is kick-started by Dominic sending a round-robin email to our customers on a Friday morning announcing the bakery is open (sometimes, when we go away, we have to close). As orders for the loaves - white, rye, fruit and baguettes - come in and are stuck on the fridge door, the children estimate how much dough to make. Over the past months, the interesting part has been watching the children at work. They have developed an instinct with the dough, knowing when it is too wet, or too dry; remarking when the fresh flour from 2011"s harvest arrived and the bread was almost impossibly sticky. They both have very strong arms - Jack can knead the dough for a magnificent 18 loaves in one piece. They sniff the sourdough, checking that it has not become too acidic, and they are rigorous about not contaminating it with unwashed hands. When they shape the dough, they do it extraordinarily sensitively, not wishing to squash a single bubble made by the slow-acting yeast. They have strong opinions about the standard of the bread, noting variations in the quality. Lara told me off once when there was a "mouse" of uncooked dough in the centre of one of our raisin loaves. There have been moments. One Friday evening a few weeks into the venture, Jack announced he had had enough and the bakery was stopping him seeing friends. He left, my warning that he would be "out" for good, having let everyone down, ringing in his ears. I was upset, thinking the bakery would probably not last, after everything we had done. Five minutes later Jack returned. He had turned round before reaching the bus stop - and I could have punched the air. Often, late on a Friday night when the dough is sleeping in its cloths and everyone has gone to bed, I think about why the bakery is still going, and decide we are all protective of it. Protective of the little service industry my children have created for those who live around us, and of the goodness of the product. Stopping would be a sort of infanticide - we would literally have to kill the Pocket Bakery yeast. That has become unthinkable. The children set up the business just for the money. One year on, the greatest thing about it is that the brother and sister bakers can say for sure that it is not just about the money. Rose Prince's Baking Club starts next Saturday in Weekend The Daily Telegraph Good Produce Guide by Rose Prince (Hardie Grant) is available for £12.99 plus £1.25 p&p from Telegraph Books. Call 0844 871 1515 or books.telegraph.co.uk. roseprince.co.uk Look out for Weekend next Saturday 25th, when I will be launching the Rose Prince Baking Club, a forum for recipes, reader tips and advice. Each week I will include a recipe, starting with simple scones through to bread, cakes, biscuits, buns, pastries and tarts, with explanations and troubleshooting advice. I also hope to hear from you, via letters and comments on the website (you'll be able to do this at the end of each piece), with your queries and recipes. I'd like to create a community of enthusiastic bakers who help each other get the best results. I know that there are thousands of gifted bakers out there; I'd like to make a place for you to share your secrets. Write to me at Rose Prince's Baking Club, Weekend, 111 Buckingham Palace Rd, London SW1W 0DT; or go to telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink, and follow the links.