Simple white loaf

My track record with bread is pretty poor. A few years ago I asked for a bread-maker for Christmas because I wanted to make my own bread but minus the risk inherent - I thought - in doing it by hand. My machine has served me well.

But then I decided I wasn't prepared to be defeated by something as basic as bread. So I dug out my increasingly trusty Great British Bake Off recipe book, took a deep breath and gave it my best shot. I made sure that all my ingredients were fresh (in the sense of starting with unopened, or only recently opened, packets) - I'm fairly sure that my more recent failures have been largely down to out-of-date or long-opened ingredients.

The GBBO recipe is about as simple as you can get - mix together strong white flour, salt, yeast and water, knead well, leave to rise, shape, leave to rise again, bake.

That's it.

But I've realised using this book that it's all about the detail - the consistency of the mixed dough, the length of time you knead for, the temperature of the place where you leave the dough to rise. I've learnt that if I follow these recipes to the letter it's almost impossible to get a poor result, and this lesson served me well.

This is the best bread I've ever made, miles better than anything that's come out of the bread-maker. To be honest, I'd resigned myself to the fact that the benefit of the machine was limited to knowing exactly what went into the loaf - it certainly wasn't any cheaper than buying even a decent loaf from a supermarket. But this bread is SO cheap - I have friends who are living below the line this week and I wish I'd done the maths a bit earlier in the week as this bread would make a massive difference to someone's ability to stick to spending just £1 a day on food!!

In fact, today I've made this recipe for the second time, and put half of it in the freezer to see how well it survives - if it lives to tell the tale I'm going to seriously have to consider putting the bread-maker on eBay and never buy a loaf of bread again...

Charity China

I've realised how dangerous charity shops are when you're looking for interesting tableware. I popped into my local Oxfam shop a couple of days ago to drop off some bits and pieces and while the lady was sorting my items I had a quick look at the homewares section.

Next thing I knew I was handing over £4.99 for a 16-piece set of fairly kitsch English bone china to add to my afternoon tea crockery collection. I realise it's not to everyone's taste (to be honest it's not really to my taste!) but I thought that diluted with some plain cups, plates and saucers they could be quite fun. We'll see...

In fact, I have afternoon tea news! In a couple of weeks time my sister is having a few friends over and I'll be providing a full-on tea time spread. Actually, it'll be at lunch time but who cares! So we'll see if I have the capacity to make and serve all you'd want from afternoon tea from scratch on my own...