The Hebridean Baker Coinneach MacLeod is just back from almost three weeks touring in the United States and he says he’s glad to be home.

‘Home’ is huge part of what has shot Coinneach to fame over the past four years, the world having fallen in love with his simple, rustic Hebridean lifestyle.

He began posting simple videos on social media combining his passion for traditional home baking with life on Lewis on the Outer Hebrides with partner Peter and their West Highland Terrier Seòras.

“It’s amazing how our lives resonated across the world,” he says.

The original idea for Coinneach’s TikTok videos came from a baking session with his 95-year-old aunt Bellag: “I was round at hers one day and it happened to be her 65th wedding anniversary. She was telling me about having made clootie dumpling for her wedding cake and began to speak about all the legends and stories around wedding cakes. I thought it would be great to share them, so I made a wee video.”

Thinking his videos would mainly be of interest to island folk, Coinneach was shocked to wake up one morning to find one of them had attracted 750,000 views. The next one reached one million views.

He discovered he had an American Elle magazine columnist as a fan, who had written about him in an article describing him as a “sexy Scottish baker” who “sounds like I imagine a piece of shortbread would sound if it came to life”.

The size of his US fan base shot through the roof.

He has since been named Scotland’s Food & Drink Influencer of the Year and was the joint winner of the culture award at the recent Scottish LGBTI+ awards, The Unicorns.

 

 

@hebrideanbaker Hebridean Baker recipe - Scottish Tablet. Happy St Andrew’s Day 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 #hebrideanbaker #fyp #tablet #scotland #scottishtiktok ♬ Auld Lang Syne - Mindy Smith

 

His online content has been viewed over 28 million times; he’ll be launching his fourth book – The Hebridean Baker: The Scottish Cook Book – at Wigtown and has appeared on several television shows including This Morning, Martin Compston’s Scottish Fling, and Canadian talk show The Social.

“Am I the best baker in Scotland? No,” he says, “but I use food as a conduit to talk about our language, culture and lifestyle.

“It’s quite humbling the love there is for Scotland, particularly in the US. It’s so special to go across the world and people know everything about Scotland. They even know how to say my name better than people here.

“I never thought I’d ever feel like Tom Jones, but that’s how it feels when I do an event there.”

With his father a fisherman and his mother a weaver of Harris Tweed, Coinneach’s childhood was deeply embedded in Hebridean culture but, like so many rural young Scots, he spent his first 18 years desperate to leave.

He worked in Russia in an orphanage and then as a journalist there and in Australia. Later he moved into sport, working on branding, design and marketing for football teams including Celtic FC and the national teams of Mexico, India and Lithuania. For the past 13 years Coinneach has worked for UEFA in football development in Africa.

Another tour in the US in September started at Scottish Games in Virginia and ends, just a week before Wigtown Book Festival, at Highland Games in New Hampshire, with appearances everywhere from New Orleans and Memphis to Colorado and Boston in between.

“I don’t think of this as a job, but if it was, it would be the best job in the world,” Coinneach says, though he adds that wherever he is in the world, he always feels the pull of the Hebrides: “There’s a beautiful Gaelic word, ‘cianalas’, which means a longing for home. That never leaves you.”