We bought a Kenwood Chef food processor at the weekend, to replace our old hand-held mixer which has developed a slightly dodgy switch.

We tried it out last night, making our fluffy pancakes using the beater attachment. This afternoon I made a bread dough to try out the bread hook. The recipe which came with it used 3lb of flour which is rather a lot so I tried half that, using my usual 1/3 wholemeal, 2/3 white bread flour mixture.

The dough hook seems to need a large amount of dough to work properly, the amount I made was probably the bare minimum, so if I used it to make a pizza base I would either need to make a loaf at the same time or make several weeks of dough and freeze batches of it.

The bread was more or less the same as my usual hand-made bread but took much less effort. I only had to do a small amount of kneading at the end to shape the loaf before its final proving.

I've been doing some work in Leicester for a few months. I had to test out a new camera which has been bought for a project which needs images taken at regular intervals.

I decided to take the camera for a bit of a walk at lunchtime, along with a fisheye lens, and took some photos in the Leicester Castle area.

One of the towers at the approach to the Castle.

St Mary De Castro Church