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As a trained accountant and a long-time baking enthusiast, Hermine Dossou knows a thing or two about saving money in the kitchen. “My first breadmaker was from Panasonic – I bought it from Gumtree,” the former Great British Bake Off contestant says. “It was basically somebody’s wedding present that they didn’t want and they sold it half price.” A devotee of Martin Lewis’s Money Saving Expert website, the 42-year-old, who was born in Benin, West Africa, and moved to the UK for university aged 20, tries to avoid ever paying full price for a big ticket item. “If I wanted to buy, let’s say, a mixer, I would go online, and type ‘Kenwood discount vouchers’ and then something always comes up,” says Dossou, who lives in Kettering and came fourth on the 2020 series of Bake Off. But the mum-of-one – whose son Steven is 13 – wasn’t always such a frugal foodie. “That came from that period where I became a single mum on a reduced income,” she says. “I couldn’t work full-time because I had to look after my son, and also I didn’t want him to have the processed kind of bakes.” Whipping up cakes and cookies filled her “empty afternoons” as a new mum and was a lot cheaper than buying ready-made baked goods. “I would cook from scratch and prep my vegetables when I could get them on offer,” she continues. “Same for fruits – they are often very discounted when they become a bit soft, and that’s the best time to make jam.” Even post-Bake Off and her book deal (she works full-time as an accountant), Dossou remains a savvy shopper, knowing that a higher price doesn’t always mean a better product. “Like a bar of chocolate, if it’s the same quantity of cocoa, why are you paying three times the price? Especially if you’re going to bake with it. “Wonky onions at half the price is the same… they all come from the same farm.” Her accountancy skills came in handy, too, and she still uses a spreadsheet to track her income and outgoings every month. “I think generally in life it is important to budget and know where your money goes, because I think it allows you to achieve a lot more than if you were just living freestyle,” Dossou says. “It’s a nightmare trying to get on the housing ladder here in the UK – that’s something I’ve been able to do through being thrifty in every area of my life.” That’s why she decided to call her first cookbook The Thrifty Baker: “I just really wanted to bring that awareness of how we choose what we eat, and how we can save through making little changes here and there.” “Now, more than ever, when people are struggling with the cost of living, I think it’s even more important to go back to those values of cooking from scratch, trying to cook at home, and making meals from, you know, not much.” With lots of advice for beginners, the book focuses on affordable dishes, from basic breads and simple biscuits to special occasion puds and impressive-looking desserts. There’s a distinct Gallic influence (Benin, where Dossou learned to bake as a child, is a former French colony) felt with recipes such as pain de campagne, orange and brown butter madeleinesm and pear frangipane tart. The author points out when a recipe can be cooked in an air fryer – a recent Black Friday bargain she loves because it allows her to enjoy fried Benin delicacies using less oil and without turning on the oven. “Because we have a really small family, just me and my son, you don’t always want to put the oven on just to bake something for two. “With an oven you’ll need to preheat it for a good 15 to 20 minutes before you can even bake in it. With the air fryer you just put the cake in and 15 minutes later it’s out – easy and convenient.” There’s also a section devoted to microwaveable mug cakes, with peanut butter and jam, speculoos (aka Biscoff) and chocolate hazelnut flavours of the cheap and easy-to-make single-serve puds. “In the microwave you can make a cake in five minutes from weighing, mixing and baking,” says Dossou, who loves how kid-friendly they are. “With my son I feel more inclined to let him make a mug cake than maybe something bigger. “Even if it goes wrong he’s not wasting a lot of ingredients and, you know, he’s not turning the kitchen into a bonfire.” ‘The Thrifty Baker’ by Hermine Dossou (White Lion, £18.99).

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In schools, trends come and go like clockwork, whether they be related to a toy like fidget spinners or pranks they have seen on the internet. One teacher has opened up about a new and “annoying quirk” that has young people calling themselves “coin boys” and constantly flipping quarters. The anonymous teacher took to Reddit to complain about freshmen they teach participating in the “coin boys” trend. The hilarious post explained: “The newest thing here is a flock of self-proclaimed ‘coin boys’ who carry a quarter on hand at all times and constantly flip it. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter “They have their entire personality revolve around coins, coin flips, and chance. When we went around doing an ice-breaker, 4 or 5 of the kids said some variation of ‘I live by the coin and die by the coin’ as their fact.” In the post, the teacher said one of the “coin boys” said he was going to flip a coin that would decide if he was going to do the assigned piece of work or not. The teacher explained: “When I assigned the first assignment of the school year, one of the coin boys was bold enough to say ‘heads I do it, tails I don’t.’ “I told him if he flipped the coin he would be getting a call home on the first week of HS. He flipped it anyway and it came up heads (thank god for that at least). “But then the other coin boy in that class flipped his coin and it came up tails. He said the coin has spoken and he’s not doing it. I say very well, enjoy your 0 and your call home— what a great way to start off the school year and your high school career.” Their post proceeded to go viral across social media, with many finding the post absolutely hilarious and pledging to “stand with the coin boys”. The teacher said they had looked up the trend online but hadn’t seen anything else about it, theorising that it must be a local group of friends who made it up. But, thanks to the viral post, it may have the opposite effect. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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