About

I'm Emily and I run Offonwednesdays—a creative space to share my unwavering love of making biscuits. From a microbakery in Māngere Bridge, I bake one-of-a-kind biscuits using a variety of organic flours, the best New Zealand nuts and jams made with peak season fruit from unconventional growers. Here's my story of how I ended up just making biscuits. 

I am very lucky to have spent the past 15 years working in every corner of the food industry—beginning at Ferrandi pastry school in France, a 3 Michelin star restaurant, a handful of small cafes & bakeries, a Laos restaurant, a vegan ice cream factory... and all the way to the polar opposite end—that is, developing products for global fast food chains. 

A pivotal point in my career happened when I met two brothers selling their bread at farmer's markets in San Diego (Prager Brothers). They introduced me to a variety of heritage grains I'd never heard of. We traded our experiences over the shaping bench—I added a few sweet things to their menu and they taught me how to make bread with fresh milled flours.

Whole wheat flours don't perform the same as commodity flour—it's an exchange of convenience and consistency in place of flavour, texture and diversity. As Dawn Woodward (of Evelyn's Crackers) puts it best, flour is flavour. This principle pushes me to explore beyond the familiar, and capture the expression of biodiversity in what I bake.

I’ve been a baker for more than a decade now and it seems the longer I do this, the more I'm drawn to one simple category—biscuits. Squirreled away in my pocket through all my years in hospitality, they were a pick me up amidst the chaos. For me, it's the most perfect pairing to a cuppa. Leaning against my mug, it is a humble, unassuming sweet bite that's just content being the best companion.

Near the end of 2019, I flew across the Pacific to do a solo road trip up and down the Land of the Long White Cloud and found myself trapped in this paradise. I met a kind kiwi bloke and... I'm sure you've heard the story before. For awhile, I put away my apron and followed some sensible advice: keep your passion a hobby and make your living off your talent. 

Together, we built a pretty good life here in Aotearoa but something was clearly missing. I had a burning desire to return to my craft and explore the viability of running a microbakery focused purely on crafting biscuits. Perhaps I'm after the pie in the sky but I believe the journey is still worth taking. Thank you for supporting a creative space.