Heston Blumenthal's Waitrose range gets our thumbs-up

Hot Dinners was full of the festive spirit (and food) last night when we attended the Christmas launch for Waitrose in Fitzroy Square. While it was rather surreal checking out the latest gifts and party food for December in the middle of July, what we were mainly looking forward to trying was some of the new Heston Blumenthal range of food developed exclusively for the supermarket.

Scheduled to hit the shops in October, the Heston range covers everything from vanilla mayonnaise to Ponzu dressing. It's all very smartly packaged and the higher-end products will cetainly make for nice presents for fussy foodies.

The first thing we tasted was Heston's Lapsang Souchong tea-smoked salmon, which was really very good - sliced slightly thicker than Waitrose's normal smoked salmon and with a distinctive but delicate taste.

But far and away the hit of the night - and destined to be a sellout come December - was Heston's Christmas pudding. Containing a whole candied Moroccan orange in the centre, this converted even the die-hard Christmas pud/candied peel haters at Hot Dinners.