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My Best Dessert Recipe

I don’t make dessert very often. My dental integrity and blood sugar levels would be far too compromised. I am a high functioning sugar-head with the self discipline of a Winnie the Pooh and a pot of honey. But I do love a good dessert and I think the trick […]

Best Dessert Recipe

Vegan Chocolate Mousse Recipe

Vegan Chocolate Whisky Mousse

This sneaky little vegan chocolate mousse will have friends and family squealing with incredulity. “I can’t believe it’s vegan!’ Yes, it is very scrummy. Putting aside the controversy over whether the phytoestrogens in tofu give blokes ‘man-boobs’ or not, this recipe is an excellent one to have up your sleeve […]


RECIPE: Basil Seed and Lime Friands

My friend’s dog died recently. I have to declare that I’m not really a doggy person, but Frisco was a chilled and laid-back kind of sausage, and in his quietness, he let me grow quite fond of him. He wasn’t bouncy or brash or ballsy, but you always knew he […]

Lime and Basil Seed Friands recipe 2

RECIPE: Honeycomb Icecream

“Homemade Honeycomb Icecream : a heady creamy mix with kicks of fizzy honeycomb flakes”   I can eat good homemade icecream any time of the year. My tummy is not weather sensitive and my sweet tooth will happily make friends with a bowl of luscious creamy blobs whether the sun […]


RECIPE: Chickpeas in Coconut Milk 2

“You’re not much of a celebrity, are you?”.   I’m smidgingly besotted by India. If I could only travel to one more country in my entire lifetime it would be that enigmatic, perplexing, intoxicating country. I’ve visited her half a dozen times and spent a total of about two and […]

Chickpeas in Coconut Milk - recipe

Recipe_Dried Blood Orange

Pimp Your Blood Oranges

There’s something almost prehistoric about the way blood oranges look. I love the look of blood oranges.  They taste amazing of course, but there’s something almost prehistoric about the way they look.  All our rules around visual appearance tell us they shouldn’t really be this weirdo combination of red and orange. […]


Boozy Chocolate and Hazelnut Roulade

This is the one that prompted the penning of “A moment on the lips a lifetime on the hips”. There. You have been warned. It is, however rather scrummy and a worthy contender for your weekly calorie intake. It’s slightly fiddly to make but that’s probably a good thing as […]

Hazelnut and Chocolate Roulade

Dill and Ginger Roesti

In defence of the Potato 2

If a snuggle came in vegetable form it would be a Potato. Mashed with knoblets of naughty, creamy butter. Fried to a crisp in duck fat, billowy inside and chalky outside. Wrapped in cream and nutmeg and layered in thin slices. They’re all edible snuggles. It seems quite mean that ‘they’ […]


The Wisdom of the Quince

Quinces are humbling. One of those old school fruits that remind me, that in a skirmish with Time, I shall never win. I start out insanely desperate to cook with them. They’re in season for such a short Time. It has to be now. I scurry high and low, clamoring […]


Scratch Recipe: Perfect Pesto

Can anyone remember the world before Pesto? Anyone? Pesto seems to have been pimping our pastas and glaming our dowdy fritattas since, oh, 1882?  In reality, few people outside Italy had heard of Pesto until the 1990s but it’s definitely taken on the ‘comfortable old slippers’ role in the culinary shoe cupboard […]


Scratch Recipe: How to make Baba Ganoush 2

I don’t make the best baba ganoush I’ve ever eaten. This is not false humility.  I actually make a great baba ganoush, it’s just that somewhere in central London you’ll find a better baba ganoush than mine. It makes me a little tetchy to admit that, but there you have […]

Baba ganoush

Chocolate Honeycomb Recipe

Scratch Recipe: Honeycomb Chocolate Soldiers

This recipe for Honeycomb Chocolate Soldiers is a nostalgic nod to the gluttony of my youth.  In the general store my parents owned in Australia, the “Violet Crumble” was often used as payment for doing an after-school shift behind the shop-counter. A long slender bar of crisp, brittle honeycomb encased […]


Scratch Recipe: Salmon Gravlax

I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but gravlax is actually very easy to make. It’s one of those showy dishes that people ‘Ooh’ and ‘Ahhh’ over, marvelling at your talent and technique. I shamefully confess to having stoked the fires of awe once or twice myself. But in truth it’s […]

Recipe: Salmon Gravlax

chocolate hazelnut torte recipe

Scratch Recipe: Chocolate Hazelnut Torte

It’s taken me quite some time to accept that i am a slave to my chocolate cravings.  I do know who’s boss in this tussle, and it’s really never been me. I clutch at all the stats and research that suggests chocolate is undeniably, unequivocally, unbelievably, unimaginably good for you. […]


Scratch Recipe: Pancakes 1

When I was a kid we’d just leapfrog over the indulgence of Pancake Tuesday and run headlong into the abstinence and guilt of Ash Wednesday; followed by six weeks of deprivation.   This seems grossly unfair in hindsight, but at the time we didn’t know that a day of nutella and […]


Scratch Recipe: Coriander + Lime Calamari

  This zingy concoction can be made wither with or without chilli.  I rather like it with chilli but I’ve had a few guests who can’t eat chilli so I did an ok version without it.  It’s fabulous in this calamari dish but is also rather scrummy with chicken, prawns, […]