Returning to the Wheatfields: 

A Journey to Kringle and Back Home Again

There are places that feed you long before you take a bite. Kringle, Dorthe’s Danish bakery in Bents Green, Sheffield, is one of them. I arrived hoping to learn the tang and texture of sourdough, but left with something far more difficult to knead into existence: a renewed sense of belonging, the warm, steady heartbeat of family rediscovered.

The Reunion That Rose Like Dough

I hadn’t seen my cousin Dorthe for at least eighteen years, a stretch of time long enough for entire forests to grow, for children to turn into adults, and for two wheatfield girls in Denmark to become women with lives and bakeries of their own. We had only the thin string of Facebook keeping us loosely tied together across borders, seasons, and choices. So yes, we were nervous, the kind of nervous you feel before opening an old wooden box you loved as a child, not quite sure what you’ll find inside.

But from the moment we hugged at the train station, it was as if no time had passed. We were simply older, wiser versions of those girls racing through late-summer grain, now reunited with flour on our hands instead of dirt on our knees. In Sheffield, between batches of dough and sips of red wine, walking through quiet woods and laughing until our ribs ached, we stitched together the years we had missed, effortlessly, as though they’d just been folded into the dough and left to rise.

Kringle: Where Traditions Bake, and Community Gathers

Kringle, the bakery Dorthe opened with her husband Chris just three years ago, sits in Bents Green, proudly positioned in what The Times called Sheffield’s safest neighbourhood. But “safe” hardly does it justice. Stepping through the door feels more like stepping into a well-kept family secret: warm wooden counters, trays of Danish pastries glowing like edible jewels, and staff who greet you with genuine delight, not rehearsed customer service smiles. Many of them are literally family and the rest simply become family by osmosis.

Dorthe hadn’t worked as a baker for twenty years before opening Kringle; she’d travelled, tried different jobs, lived other lives. When she and Chris decided to return to baking, the universe threw them a curveball or two, including the challenge of getting proper electricity into the building. But once the ovens roared to life, everything else followed. “The first day jitters soon faded and we have been going from strength to strength,” she told me, her voice carrying equal measures of pride and disbelief.

And the neighbourhood agrees. People queue outside the door, thumbs raised in approval, calling it a gift to Bents Green, the kind of place that feels instantly essential, as though it were always meant to be there. Danish expats even drive for hours to taste pastries that remind them of home. And on Swirl Wednesday, production ramps up to five times the normal amount, and still they sell out, because a £1.50 swirl from Kringle isn’t just pastry. It’s nostalgia in spiraled form.

Learning, Laughing, and the Legacy of Edith and Helga

I had come to learn. Sourdough techniques, bakery rhythms, the subtle knowledge that is never written down but always passed hand to hand. And learn I did. Dorthe shared her secrets, let me fold real experience into my own dreams for the bakery I run each tourist season in Fjone, deep in the forests of Telemark, Norway. She handed me a dried piece of one of Kringle’s starters. Part science, part heirloom. At Kringle they are named Edith and Helga, after the grandmothers who taught her the value of traditions and how to cook and bake the old-fashioned way.

I named mine Dorthe, because starters deserve names that mean something and because everything I learned came from her hands, her heart, her life. I’m already dreaming of baking sourdough Tiger Bread in my own bakery in 2026, inspired by Kringle’s version, a sourdough loaf whose crust cracks open into a pattern like a tiger’s coat, crisp as winter air and full of flavour that sings rather than speaks. 

What struck me most was hearing what truly makes Dorthe happiest: “seeing a shop full of smiling people… the excitement of others tasting Kringle goods.” Her joy isn’t rooted in success alone, but in the shared experience, the spark in someone’s eyes when they take that first bite. And in that moment, I realized how alike we are in so many ways. That recognition, paired with the gentle stillness of the bakery in the early morning, is something that also fills me with a quiet, genuine happiness.

During my days in the bakery, I felt not like a visitor, but like I’d stepped into an ongoing family story, handed an apron and told: Here, you belong too.

The In-Between Moments

At Kringle, the real magic happens between the obvious highlights. In the quiet pauses while dough rests, in the shared glances between staff who know each other’s rhythms, in the thirty seconds where a customer inhales the scent of a fresh swirl and remembers something soft and personal from childhood.

A swirl here is never just a swirl. It’s a pause in a busy day, a secret gift, a small edible moment of joy. It’s what you bring to someone you love, or what you give yourself when life feels a bit too sharp around the edges. These pastries, these breads, they are Dorthe’s way of honouring not just Danish tradition, but the simple truth that our lives are made not in grand occasions, but in the warm, fleeting in-between moments.

And now, after Sheffield, I know that those moments, just like good sourdough, are best when shared.

by Bente Levisen