The Baking Circle is gone, in part

[BakerAunt]

It made me want to bake (hence that cinnamon-swirl bread loaf) as an affirmation that life goes on.

[Mike Nolan]

The KAF home page no longer has a link to a 'community' page.

[JennC13]

I'm so sad to see the community page gone. It's where I was able to get so much information and help from everyone, sometimes just by lurking around. I know many of you are upset with KAF, but I still feel like they have a good product and will continue be a patron. Trust me, I'm always looking for a deal, so sometimes I'll shop around for the unique items - like coconut milk powder that I get at my Asian grocery much cheaper. But I feel like the blogs and recipes are so well tested - I'm almost always successful with them. I can't say that about a lot of recipes I find online. I know we all have different opinions on the subject - just wanted to give mine.

[BakerAunt]

What makes me sad is that we have been dispersed. There are people that I do not "see" on this site or on Zen's site, and I miss them.

Like you, I will continue to buy KAF products that do the job. I no longer, however, have a warm feeling about the company; instead, I feel indifferent, the way I would with most companies with which I do business. For years, there was a sense that we in the Baking Circle were important to them, so finding out that we are not was like having the rug pulled out from under our feet, and we never saw it coming.

Mike's and Zen's sites do offer us possibilities that we did not have at the KAF site, so I plan to focus on those and eagerly await additional developments on both. In the meantime, everyone, start your ovens and bake, or cook, or make jam, and then come here and tell us about it!

[Mike Nolan]

I don't know how many regulars there were at the BC, but I do have access to Google Analytics data for my site, and we've got fairly steady group of around 60 regular visitors, though only perhaps about half of have posted more than once. Not a lot of newcomers yet, and a number of BC stalwarts don't appear to be either here or posting on Zen's site yet.

Based on my experience with other sites, that's about a third of what we need to be a self-sustaining community. I figure it's my job over the next several months to work on building user counts and traffic, starting with getting into the search engines and doing some promotional work, which probably means working the social networking sites.

I've got some notes and a few outlines for about another dozen blog posts so far, I just need to start making time to write them. I will be taking a chocolate class this fall and plan to write a series on that. (And that doesn't count the time I need to spend working on the site itself.)

• This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[omaria]

Mike, just take all the time you need . We are happy to be here and on Zen's site.

Jenn, of course you can buy all the flour and other things you need from KAF. And use their recipes. Many of us will do the same. Me included, but I will not go out of my way to do so, or sing their praises to family and friends. Like BakerAunt said, they have become just another company .

[wonky]

It is just so sad. I feel like a very good friend has moved to another country, and I will never see her again. Did I not read that we would still be able to access our saved KAF recipes? I looked around there, but could not find them. Maybe I misread, and they are gone also. I am just heart broken over this whole sad situation.

[Mike Nolan]

Zen, Sarah and others have hopefully saved the bulk of the member recipes from the BC. (I think Sarah said Zen saved them all.) Hopefully those who have them saved will start uploading them here or over on Zen's site soon. My offer stands to put up a searchable archive of them if someone has them in bulk, but unless/until I can figure out a way to bulk load them into WordPress, it'll probably be a separate archive.

I ported over all my recipes, but I think the only one I saved that wasn't one I originally posted was BigLakeJudy's molasses cookie recipe. I'm probably going to post a shortened version of Griz's spaetzle recipe, because it's the best one I've tried, and Griz said it was originally from CIA.

With most GM flour off the market for a while due to the recall, I'm not sure what flour I'll buy the next time I need some. I'm fairly sure there are things I will still order from KAF, like pastry flour and semolina, but with my wife on a low-carb diet, I'm not doing much baking and probably won't make any pies until fall. The local pie cherry orchard is about to open up for the season, but I've still got some pie cherries frozen from last season. But not being on their site every day, I probably won't be doing a lot of impulse shopping on the KAF site.

[BakerAunt]

Hi, Wonky,

Actually, KAF said that the recipe box, with all of our recipes, would go away. I checked what I have, and I do not appear to have gotten yours in my haphazard saving in the last days of the Baking Circle. (I was also having internet issues.) However, Zen saved everything, and Sarah (Swirth) saved a lot. There may be other people, who were saving here and there as I was, who saved your recipes. I want to look at your Amish bread, so I hope we will hear from someone.

[cwcdesign]

Wonky, I also replied over on Zen's site. I'm pretty sure that rottiedogs saved your recipes as well. She is on swirth's email list. You could write her directly in case she's not checking in very often yet.

[BakerAunt]

Mike: I made a list of the people whose recipes I have and posted it on Zen's site. All the ones I saved are Word documents. I did my best to get rid of the KAF formatting stuff; I was rushing at the end, so I need to go back and check. When I'm home next week, I would have some time to start posting some of these recipes. I'm not quite sure where to start. If anyone wants to look at the list, I'm open to suggestions. I also hope to post some of my own recipes that I never got around to posting on the Baking Circle. Ironically, this was the summer I planned to imput some of them.

[S_Wirth]

Back in 2011, I sent jej's recipes to her in groups...over 100. Hers did not get moved from the oldBC due to an email snafu. She tried adding a few on the newBC but she never got many of them of all she had.

I sent rottiedogs pages of recipes/names/stuff to save that I never put on the BC at the end. I have many of the same ones others saved but I got Carla's and Cyndiok's that I doubt anyone else got under their names. I had rottiedogs save the old FAQ at the end when we got extra time. I like that we saved so many as a group under a name.

I'm so glad we got a lot of the threads saved, too. I had one on chocolate cakes but never did find it to save. It was as nice as the white and yellow cake threads I started. I saved the KAF Crumb Cakes recipe they sent out with the Toaster Cakes recipe with the 4 x 1" stand alone cake papers. Cooksgirl tinkered with it and did a 9 x 13" pan version. DL and I loved making that recipe.

I wonder if anyone got Bookbag's recipes saved. She got honked off and deleted her account in late Jan. 2004 so her posted recipes went with her but BCers had several of hers saved and put together a bunch of them in a thread.

When I saved in Word, I just got the recipe title and the whole recipe, leaving all the other stuff off.

Jej emailed me maybe last week and asked for the sites details and I sent her the good stuff she needed to join but I never heard back from her and have not seen her on any of the sites.

We all got enough saved to make a big dent in the whole lot KAF had.

[rottiedogs]

Wonky - I need to check both computers to see if I saved yours. If I don't Zen does.

Swirth - I have bookbags recipes in a few different threads. I think I also have the chocolate cake thread.

I have 2 hours to kill every morning before work so I saved a ton there. I need to merge the folders together from each computer. Then I can start to load them. They are all word 2010 documents. To save as much as possible I copied and pasted. Nothing is pretty but that is fixable.

[Mike Nolan]

Should I create a separate forum for old BC threads? I assume saved recipes could just go in the recipes forum.

[rottiedogs]

A separate forum is a good idea. I think it would be easier to locate specific threads. I saved them all with the name from the bc and "thread" at the end of the file name so I could sort them together. There are some recipes I can start as they are on my home computer. I was thinking to start with dvdlee's.

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