You know this because you were one.

Every Saturday for twenty-five years, you made bread. Proper bread — the kind that filled the house with that smell, the kind the family would hover around the kitchen for, the kind you'd cut thick and hand round with a good slather of butter.

Then came the diagnosis.

And with it came the experiments. The YouTube videos. The blog recipes that didn't specify which flour blend. The £6 bags of this and that from the health food shop. The loaves that came out fine on the outside, dense as a house brick in the middle. The cakes that crumbled the moment you tried to slice them — and the frozen smile as everyone said, "It's lovely, honestly."

You know that smile.

If any of those sentences have come out of your mouth — or stayed quietly in your head — then you already know the rest.

You've tried the books. The ones with beautiful photographs and recipes that call for "a good GF flour blend" without telling you which one. You've wasted bags of expensive flour. You've had the crumbly cake moment. The sunken middle. The loaf that looked promising until you cut it and found the texture of damp cardboard inside.

And somewhere along the way, you started wondering: is it me?

It isn't you.

The recipes were wrong. The testing wasn't thorough enough. The authors didn't stay in the kitchen long enough to work out why it failed on the third attempt.

That's what this book is about.