I am particularly fond of this version of apple pie, as it came together with much lateral thinking. It is a combination of the cooking technique of two French delicacies: tarte Tatin, the famous upside-down caramel and apple pie, and clafoutis, cherry pie in a pancake batter.

THE BATTER
3 eggs
125ml milk
40g flour
60g sugar
zest of [...]

I owe a lot to Anne Willan’s excellent work La Varenne Cooking Course. Not that the work provided any instant recipes, but it did more than any other book to teach me the basics of cooking. It is simply written, full of lovely anecdotes, beautifully illustrated, and clearly pronounces the do’s and don’ts of the [...]

How do you teach your children to not only cook, but to enjoy cooking, to use the kitchen creatively? Do you leave it to interaction: all in together ‘helping’ to chop and whisk and smash eggs etc? Or to osmosis: smells, and tastes, and admiring great results? Or do you leave them to it, handing [...]

There is only one recipe for Christmas pudding. It be longs to your mother, who picked it up from your grandmother, who learnt it from her neighbour, who once was lover to the cook to Queen Victoria, who got it from her mother…
For all generations before us, it was mum, or her mum, or her [...]

I first ran into this type of dessert in a little hotel in the middle of France. We were all bemused to see on the menu ’souffle glace’. Something wrong here, I thought. How can you have an iced souffle? ‘Simple,’ said the maitre d’, ‘It’s just a parfait, frozen inside a mould extended by some [...]

The best ice cream is vanilla bean ice cream, the best dessert is vanilla ice cream with just-warmed-through raspberries, but …

… you have to vary the routine occasionally, or else you’ll be sick of it before you know it. I made my way down this course when the peppermint bush started to grow and grow [...]

Sometimes we forget the most simple things. Which is why there has been such a trend in smart restaurants to serve up the old dishes that have been forgotten or so mistreated by years of sloppy cooking that they have been discredited. Thus lamb shanks, fish & chips, pesto, bread and butter pudding, a dozen [...]

The concept of the Kreem-b-tween was a triumph for Peters Ice Cream. You know the company — it went by the swinging slogan ‘The Health Food of a Nation’. The health freaks of the nineties might dispute that ice cream is a health food, stuffed, as it should be, with eggs, sugar, milk and cream! [...]

Crème brûlée is one of the simplest of desserts, and a triumph to serve — if you have the equipment to do the job. I fiddled and failed several times with this dessert all over the place — at home, in the restaurant, all ways — but couldn’t get that glassy caramel on top of [...]

Custard is one of those things we should mark down as an early and vital lesson in learning to cook, leading as it does to so many wonders at the end of the meal. What would a Christmas pudding be without a custard sauce? How would you sink into profiteroles without pastry cream? And ice [...]