bread on the night

I was sent on a mission involving an unusual aisle of the supermarket during the weekend.

My target was to find moulding icing, which is not part of my usual spectrum of shopping possibilities. The risk was that it would take me at slow speeds close to areas that I don't usually visit. Multiple passes too, because it wasn't called moulding icing and came in a chunky oblong box in a choice of white or ivory*.

The danger of slow speed meant I'd have time to note the adjacent area containing the flours and bakery products. I loitered just too long in the bread-making area. Like a tractor beam those stone ground flours were beckoning, along with various brands of baker's yeast.

First, and almost accidentally, a pack of seeded flour fell into my trolley, and then a couple of others, with me partly drawn to the brightness of the packaging and those cursive artisan scripts.

I knew I'd gone too far, when I arrived home and found myself smuggling the heavy bag of excess baking products past the security scanners. There was nothing for it, I'd have to get my hands into some dough.

Hours passed and that tell-tale aroma of bread in preparation began to waft through the scene. Would I be rumbled? Not as I was also preparing a relatively spicy evening meal.

By the next morning, it was too much to hide. The first bread was ready in all its glory. I like to think of it as different in a good way from the bread in the supermarkets. And it seems to have met with approval. It's only Monday and we are onto the second loaf.

And the moulding icing? The expresso cake guitar it eventually adorned as frets and fingerboard was also a great success.

*- reading this back, I'm slightly surprised if it was really called Ivory in these sensitive times. But I know it wasn't called beige.