Join us for our open evening at Leiths on Thursday, 16 July 2026, 6.30–8.30pm, and discover how the Culinary Diploma can launch your career in food.
Join us for our open evening at Leiths on Thursday, 16 July 2026, 6.30–8.30pm, and discover how the Culinary Diploma can launch your career in food.
On the days she’s on ‘the bake’ shift at Hamblin Bakery in Oxford, Auriol Williamson gets up at 3am. Speaking on the back of one of those shifts, she’s just finished loading 200 loaves through the oven before the rest of the team arrived at six, sending wholesale orders out before opening the shop plus a delivery dispatched to the city-centre branch. Then she made staff lunch and everyone sat together in the garden.
‘Most days you finish by 4pm. And it’s very beautiful here. You can just go off on a run or a walk, see some friends, get an early night and wake up again. I do love it.’
Hamblin is no ordinary bakery. They buy grain directly from farmers and have it milled by seventh-generation stone miller Offley Mill, based in Staffordshire, fresh to order every fortnight. The menu runs from six kinds of sourdough to cardamom buns, sausage rolls and seasonal specials – rhubarb and cardamom muffins at the time of speaking. ‘We probably use about 50 kilos of flour a day,’ Auriol says. ‘In recent years, the bakery has started getting really, really popular. There’s some exceptionally high-quality stuff being produced and I include Hamblin in that. I feel really proud of the stuff that we make.’
She arrived here by a roundabout route. Before baking, she worked in film and television – and during quiet spells between jobs, she’d go and work in a bakery. ‘It’s just what I always did,’ she says. Eventually the logic of it became undeniable. ‘I was like, “Why don’t I actually just be a baker? Why don’t you just do the thing that you love?”
Once she’d decided, she wanted to do it properly. She found the Leiths Patisserie course and signed up. ‘It was really about cementing the knowledge and proving to myself that I do know what I’m doing,’ she says. ‘Otherwise I think it’s easy to carry that insecurity that you’re self-taught – so you don’t know the right way of doing something. It was good for my confidence.’
The course covered everything from laminated doughs and enriched pastries to chocolate work, petit fours and free-from baking. But what she valued most was the conditions. ‘It was really nice to practise a sort of idealised version of how a kitchen could be. You’re like, in a dream world, it would be this calm and organised. Leiths gave me the opportunity to practise making something as well as possible – it’s so nice to give something your best shot without all the other stuff that’s always going on in the kitchen. I loved it. I’m like – “big thumbs up.”‘
She left ready to commit. ‘I came away from Leiths feeling really reassured.’ And the training has had lasting practical value. ‘I realised the other day that I’m the only person in the bakery who can cover everyone’s shift because I’ve done all the different versions of both sections. Going to Leiths gave me that repertoire.’
Her next chapter is already taking shape. She’s planning to move to Devon, with a place on a regenerative agriculture course at the Apricot Centre. And beyond that, a bakery of her own. ‘I really want to start a bakery that has a garden where we grow the produce that we bake with,’ she says. ‘A nature-friendly, sustainable garden that would also be very beautiful as a space for people to visit. Whatever’s in season in the garden, we incorporate into the menu. That’s the dream.’
Auriol studied patisserie at Leiths Culinary School. Now available as individual modules – explore the Leiths Patisserie Courses by clicking here.
To commission a cake from Auriol, find her on Instagram at @lost.tallulah.