My mother was an excellent pastry cook and like Mr Kipling she made exceedingly good cakes! I particularly recall her fruit cakes.
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However I cannot remember her trying to bake bread.
Very close to our house was a small parade of shops; newsagent, chemist, grocer, greengrocer and a bakers. She used to buy a white tin loaf from the latter leaving my father to buy the cholla when he drove into town on a Friday.
Every day either my mother or father would cut a few slices from the tin loaf at breakfast and it would be my job to watch them brown under the gas-grill turning them over to brown on the other side, making sure that I turned the grill off before they burnt. For incredulous young readers this was a time before sliced bread and we did not have an electric toaster.
Until recently for my breakfast I had been having a slice of Marks & Spencers fruit loaf with flora. However at a diabetic review of my diet after some bad blood readings the diabetic nurse declared a number of foods to be verboten including the fruit bread. She has done me a favour as for a replacement I have discovered Mark's multiseeded brown loaf which makes the finest toast I have ever tasted.