More frustrations

The bake following that mentioned at reference 1 was even worse, mainly because I forgot about it and let the first rise go on for rather too long, leaving the yeast rather tired for the second rise.

On the other hand, I also read that Tate & Lyle had the temerity to change their recipe for icing sugar recently, that is to say that they replaced one of the E numbers involved by something which sounded more organic. This has caused some outcry in the world of bakers of fancy cakes as the new icing sugar makes icing which is prone to lumps and bumps, not what the customers want at all.

Tate & Lyle do admit to making special arrangements for some of their larger customers, that is to say the big bakers, to whom they supply icing sugar under contract, so they are all right, at least for the time being. Another kick in the teeth for the little guys.

So, by analogy, have Waitrose changed the recipe for their essential white bread flour, which hitherto I had been getting on quite well with? Also with the price of 95p for 1.5 kilos of the stuff. Is there seasonal variation in the makeup of blended flour products? Have they bought up some job lot of Syrian wheat floating around on the wholesale wheat market without paying proper attention to its provenance? Is it too much to ask that they should stick warning notices about changes onto the bags?

I wonder what the customer service people at the Ashley Centre shop - the one which I usually use - would make of a query about all this? Would it even make it up to the customer service HQ? Would they just give me my money back and hope that I go away? Something which has happened in the past. Quite reasonable too when you think that 95p must be a lot less than it costs to get the query onto someone's desk, let alone the someone doing anything about it.

An upside is that, associating from icing sugar to sherbet, which I had thought was a tarted up form of icing sugar and which I usually take in lemon sherbets (best bought wrapped so that they do not coagulate into a solid mass), I have now looked sherbet up. And rather to my surprise, I find that the fizzy taste is caused by acid and base in powder form reacting with one's saliva, not by superfine sugar overwhelming the taste buds. Sugar and flavouring only needed to cover the otherwise unpleasant taste of the acid and base.

PS: were you one of those naive people who thought that icing sugar was made of just sugar?

Reference 1: the last frustrations were at http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/frustrations.html.