Fail.

You know how it is. Whilst flicking through a magazine (Waitrose Food in this case) a photograph catches the eye and for some reason, that’s it. Nothing can be done until the ingredients have been assembled and the recipe made.

Well these days, that can take some time, because it was two weeks before I could get hold of the essential ingredients for the Seville Orange and Pistachio Bread, by which time I was beyond determined to give it a try.

It was a lengthy process, beginning with boiling the two Seville oranges for an hour.

Meanwhile, the dough was made and left to prove by the warm radiator whilst we had lunch.

The pulp and the sliced peel of the cooled oranges was put in a pan with sugar and boiled for a while, making a kind of marmalade. It was about now that I wondered if it wouldn’t have been easier to just use some ready made marmalade instead of all of this faff.

But I soldiered on, rolling out the dough, spreading with the “marmalade”, some butter and sprinkling with pistachio nuts before cutting into strips and layering them vertically in a loaf tin and going off to put a few pieces in my jigsaw whilst it baked..

I’ve done the easy bit….progress is a bit slower now!

The loaf looked quite good when I took it out of the oven and smelled pretty nice too. A shame then that it was like a brick in texture and tasted so bitter that neither of us could eat it.

Oh well. Some you win and some, I lose!