Baking day

Clouds and drizzle on and off for most of the day. This morning I started making bread, but made a mistake with Clare's instruction note - she'd gone off to her study group when I got started. The dough I made was hard to knead. It turned out that I'd only used two third of the correct volume of water for the amount of flour, but before diagnosing the problem, I left the mass to leaven, which it did very slowly on the back of the stove while I was cooking lunch. 

After we'd eaten, I had to knead an extra 250ml of water into the rising dough, which was also hard work, to get it to the right consistency. Then it had to be left to rise for another hour, before being kneaded a third time before putting into the baking tins. Then I went out to walk in the drizzle for an hour.

We had a rendezvous at four at the regional headquarters of Barnardo's in Grand Avenue Ely. Clare has decided to have a go at learning the flute, and is borrowing Rhiannon's instrument for a while, and is going to take some lessons. Reading piano music with her worsening eyesight is becoming increasingly difficult, but a single line on a stave is much easier, so she can still read music for singing and hopefully for learning to play the flute. Anyway, one the costume designers Kath works with had a reason to come to Cardiff today, so she collected the flute and brought it with her for Clare to collect. The plan worked well.

When we got back the dough was ready to be cut up and put into the loaf tins to rise and go into the oven. After they were baked, they looked OK, but I was still concerned that the texture might be uneven because of my early error. When I cut a slice after they'd cooled down, I was relieved to find that the loaf sliced well without crumbling with the taste and texture it's meant to have. Lesson learned, hopefully.

Then I went out for a walk while Clare went off to her prayer group. It was dry when I left the house, so I didn't bother with a raincoat. A big mistake. I was only ten minutes away from the house when it started to drizzle, and gusts of wind made it worse. I was quite damp when I reached home. 

After supper, I watched the second part of Katya Adler's BBC 1 documentary 'Living next door to Putin'. It covered Russia's relationship with Estonia and Finland tonight. It was presented in a most interesting way to highlight the personal impact on the Ukraine on a selection of individuals living on the front line. An impressive piece of journalism. I'd be surprised if this didn't win an award.