Hollywood Boulevard

A. and I went to see Paul Hollywood at the BBC Good Food road show at the WTC on Saturday - it was supposed to be me and E but V. has been unwell so No. 1 son and I made the trip to see the TGBBO (see previous posts)star in action. He did not disappoint. We had a couple of recipes and some chat followed by a Q&A and autograph session. Both A. and I asked some questions (and by a curious symmetry me being the first of the session and A. having the last one - both captured on Video) although we were handily placed in the front row as A. had left the last session (quite interesting with a chap called Andy Bates) as soon as it had finished and rushed to bagsy some spaces.

My question about his greatest disaster (having told him about the calamitous great Raymont/Grabham bake off in October)led to two stories from him - one about the Sultan of Brunei and the other about accidentally salting rather than sugaring 1,000 doughnuts at his Father's bakery.

The WTC venue is right next to where our new offices will be located and it was good to see them progressing well.

A. was also delighted to get PH's autograph on his Bread book and last night I put one of is recipes into action - Soda Bread. As those of you who know me will recall, Soda Bread - particularly made by Mother - is one of my favourite things and so I was keen to give it a go and the directions seemed to suggest that it would be relatively straightforward.

A. and I have been going for walks after I have been getting home from work as a pre-Christmas fitness drive (baby steps...) and so we went down to Park 'n' Shop to get the ingredients. The first problem was the complete absence of plain wholemeal flour - there was pretty much every other kind of flour you could imagine but not the one we actually wanted so we ended up with some all purpose flour. The second issue is that there was only low fat buttermilk. I am pretty sure that this did not feature at any point in my Mother's rendition of this recipe but in the absence of any alternatives we pushed on with this. Given that there is in fact only 5 ingredients (plain flour, wholemeal flour, salt, bicarb and buttermilk) this was not a particularly auspicious start. Nevertheless, V. and A were soon vigorously mixing everything together and whilst the resultant doughy mixture was not exactly like the picture is in the book, it was a fairly close approximation.

It does say in the book to wait until everything has cooled down before eating. However, I could not resist warm soda bread with butter and honey and actually it tasted very good (even though I say so my self). I also had it for breakfast this morning (and hopefully at lunch) - I cannot wait to make it with the correct ingredients!