Jennifer Garner on her cozy at-home rituals, filming “Five Star Weekend” on Nantucket, and the kitchen appliances she can't live without

Jennifer Garner comes from a family of bakers – a family where the smell of bread filled the house on Sunday mornings and there was always something coming out of the oven. “That's my memory of my mother – when I was little there was always something baked,” Garner tells ELLE Decor. “On Sundays I remember the smell of bread baking in the kitchen and knowing we would get some bread.”

Her mother baked real bread that they would eat for dinner and toast the next morning—and the morning after that. She then used the other loaf to make bread men, small rolls that were glued together to form a person shape. “My sisters and I were just waiting at the oven for the bread men and we were so excited to crack them open — I eat the head first, I eat the leg first — and dip them in butter, and they were the tastiest, most delicious things in the world,” she says.

This dedication to home cooking has remained. When Garner graduated college, her family didn't give her a suitcase or a check. They gave her a KitchenAid hand mixer—the same type that hummed at least once a day, every day, during her childhood in West Virginia, mixing whatever her mother was baking that afternoon.

Years later, Garner started an Instagram series called “Pretend Cooking Show,” in which she prepares recipes in her kitchen, often with celebrity guests or her mother, and which racked up millions of views. But her devotion to cooking is undeniable.

Jennifer Garner and Jimmy Fallon on set with their KitchenAid favorites during an episode of OnBrand.

The actress is currently in Nantucket filming Five star weekenda series based on Elin Hilderbrand's book in which she plays a food influencer with multiple dream kitchens. And yes, she packed kitchen utensils in her suitcase. The irony isn't lost on her – she's essentially playing herself, except the character's kitchens are fictional and Garner's devotion is very real. The entire cast “thought about how much people would love these kitchens,” she says. She packed the entire KitchenAid cordless system – hand mixer, vacuum, blender, chopper, everything (she calls it an obsession of sorts). At home she has the classic stand mixer, which is her “best friend for life”.

What does she actually do with all these tools? “Mostly bread,” she says. Her mother's whole grain breads and breadmen. Rose Levy Beranbaum's ten-grain bread that her children “love, love, love.” Ina Garten's honey white bread, which she turns into cinnamon bread or, you guessed it, more bread men. Pizza dough when the mood is right. And salsa – lots of salsa. “I can always be talked into making salsa,” she admits, making portions of it with a small chopper and eating it with fried chicken, fish, chips, or just about anything within reach.

Garner's kitchen style is clean and calming – soapstone, marble, blue-gray accents and lots of wood. “I love a white kitchen,” she says. “There’s just something about that clean, beautiful, simple aesthetic that lets everything else shine through.”