This weekend as we were at Mum & Dad’s, Abi spent time with Grandad again. They decided to bake more bread like they had done at Christmas and this time I got pictures! I don’t think it is the bread-making that is the attraction for Abi, although she does enjoy it – it’s more that its a special thing for her and Grandad to do together 
She is rather fond of him! And shhhh don’t tell him, but I’m rather fond of him too 
Today we had a little outing to Bristol Temple Meads Station. It’s about 10 minutes on the train from the station near my Mum’s and there’s plenty of trains. Richard was down there already as he was helping out at the “Foreign Field Southern LRP Kit Fair 2011″ so we decided it would be fun to have a little ride on the train and go and say hello. I was rather childishly excited about a trip on the train – more so that the children! I do rather like train journeys – longer ones tend to get spoilt by the worry of connections and standing around on stations in the cold, but a little trip like this is just fun
Bristol Temple Meads is an impressive station – designed by one of Bristol’s most famous people from history Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Although the main part of the current station isn’t one of the bits he designed as they extended it later. Anyway, he was pretty important in the history of the station. When I was at school we had houses named after various important Bristol people and my house was called Tyndale Brunel – named after William Tyndale and Isambard Kingdom Brunel … so clearly he was important. Well, my school thought so … anyway, back to the point, if there was one! Some pictures of the station:
The Kit Fair was in the “Passenger Shed”, one of the older parts of the station, actually designed by Brunel, which actually is not a bit that passengers go in any more. LRP if you don’t know (and many people don’t) stands for “Live Role Play”, as in people running around in woods dressed as elves, warriors, soldiers and stuff. Richard is into that sort of thing … not me … but anyway the Fair was fun. We came out with a few purchases – Abi had a cool mask (like you’d wear at a masked ball), Ben had a pair of daggers (made of foam but very realistic) and I had a dress. I’m going along to a LRP event in a couple of weeks with Richard – not going to get very involved, but will attend the banquet so would be nice to be dressed appropriately My dress is lovely, and was quite cheap compared with some of the prices, so I was very happy with it. It needs a wee bit of adjustment here and there so I won’t post pictures now – you can see it when it’s sorted out. But you can have pics of the kids with their purchases!
And finally, we may have lowered the tone slightly while we waited for our train …
I have become a little obsessed with making bread. It’s all my Dad’s fault After he and Abi baked bread rolls down in Bristol it made me want to have a go. First ones I did with the breadmaker on the dough setting, then took it out and made it into rolls. These came out nice but tasted a little on the sweet side, kind of like brioche – very nice but not quite right I think. Not sure why the breadmaker recipe includes so much sugar. I looked at the recipe on the back of the flour and that has way less sugar.
Today I decided to make some more rolls but this time do it by hand – I followed the flour bag recipe and doubled it to make a big batch – my breadmaker wouldn’t have been able to handle this much as it’s quite small. I haven’t made bread for years, but it all came back to me I tweeted throughout the process – hope I didn’t bore anyone! I was just enjoying myself and wanted to share.
Step 1: Mixing
Step 2: Kneading
Abi helped with the kneading, but she wasn’t strong enough to really work it, and the table was too high for her, so I did most of it. Very therapeutic, a nice bit of kneading
Step 3: Rising
I had to start shaping the rolls at this point before it got any bigger and overflowed the bowl!
Step 4a: Shaping plain rolls
Step 4b: Shaping seedy rolls
I split the dough and made half into plain rolls. The other half I added some seeds to- pumpkin, sunflower, sesame and pinenuts.
Finished plain rolls
Finished seedy rolls
They turned out really well, I think I am proud of my rolls!
The only problem with doing it all by hand is that it takes ages … well, really, making bread by any means takes quite a while, even in the breadmaker. It’s not something I’m going to be able to do when I’m at work, but it was really fun to do today, and maybe I’ll be able to make bread at weekends when I have more time.
While in Bristol we noticed that there was a geocache nearby so decided to go and see if we could find it. Auntie Sarah hadn’t been geocaching before so we dragged her along. The cache was in fields down from my parents’ house and the path to get to it appeared to be down the lane. The lane is a sort of farm track / foot path round the corner from Mum & Dad’s that has always been called “the lane” – as kids we would say “we’re going down the lane to play” or we’d go picking blackberries “down the lane”. So we were in a reminiscing mood as soon as we set off. My sister and I were sure everything was much bigger when we were young and some things have changed down the lane like the disappearance of the old pig sties. Anyway, to get to the point, we were heading for the cache and it started to look like it was going to be very near to a tree we spent a lot of time in during our younger years – our tree house! It wasn’t one of these tree houses that are like a shed attached to a tree – it was just a really well shaped tree with a flat bit between the branches, and an easy bit to climb up. We used to spend hours down there in the tree playing games and making friends with the cows who shared the field with us – we used to give them all names. I’m sure many of the other kids in our road played in it too, but we still thought of it as ours It was a different time back then when all the kids in the road would be playing out in the fields and gardens all day at weekends, only going home when their mums shouted out from the doorstep “dinner time!” … no mobile phones then, just the ability of mums to yell loudly enough to carry to the fields! Anyway, the cache itself was actually at the bottom of the neighbouring tree – very well hidden. So cool to find the cache right next to our tree house – thank you whoever it was who put it there! I wish I’d remembered to take a photo of our tree – it was a bit tricky though – had been clambering through brambles to get to the cache then got rather grubby retrieving it!
Today we came back from my parent’s house where we’d been staying since Boxing Day. It’s a strange feeling being back – a mixture of happy and sad, combined with what Ben & I have termed as “car-lag” – like jet-lag, but with cars. 3 hours of driving makes this morning in Bristol seem far far away and also threw out our perception of time … leading to Ben going to bed at gone 10pm!
Anyway, what I was going to blog about was Grandad. While at my parent’s house, I had the pleasure of watching Abi and my dad together – Abi adores him! She sat on his knee for hours looking at pictures on his Mac and “helping” him with the church accounts … they shared silly jokes, mainly involving imaginary kangaroos (!) … they baked bread rolls together … and every night before bed Grandad had a special goodnight hug from Miss Abi Abi told me that the reason they get on so well is genetics – she reckons that I inherited alot of Grandad’s weird genes and then she got them from me and that’s why they get on so well – they’re weird together It made me smile alot to see them – reminded me of days gone by when I was 8 and thought my Dad was the most amazing person in the world, and believed every word he said (even if it involved camels in cupboards!).
