Salt caramels

It's funny how quickly we assimilate food ideas. Salted caramel was considered suspiciously French, a kind of extreme sweetie sophistication, when we first encountered it about ten years ago. Now it's all over the place - you can even buy jars of the stuff in the supermarket.

Salt caramels are still, as far as I'm concerned, a grown-up's sweet. Buttery, creamy and velvety on the tongue, the addition of some salt to the mixture lifts the flavour, bringing out the dairy smoothness in a way you just can't achieve in an unsalted caramel. A little extra salt sprinkled on top makes for a tongue-shockingly good contrast between sweet and salty. They're easy to make at home, and make a great gift. Try them as an after-dinner nibble - they're especially good with coffee. Home-made salt caramels are also a very good application for any interesting salt you might have lurking in the cupboard (the red salt in the picture here is Hawaiian volcanic salt I was given as a present just after I got married in 2004. Embarrassingly, this is the first thing I've used it in).

I like my caramel to have a hint of smoky bitterness. The best way to achieve this is to use an unrefined sugar in the recipe. If you prefer a lighter caramel, you can substitute another 150g of caster sugar for the light brown sugar below.

The usual boiling sugar warnings apply. Do not lick the spoon or dip your finger in the mixture until it has cooled completely. Keep an eye on the pan at all times to ensure it doesn't boil over. And your life will be made much easier if you use a sugar thermometer - if you don't have one, caramel at the hard ball stage should form a squishy ball that can hold its shape but can be squeezed by the fingers when dropped into a bowl of cold water.

You'll need:

150g caster sugar
150g soft light brown sugar
80g butter (choose something with a good flavour - I used an unsalted Beurre d'Échiré)
200g double cream
75ml golden syrup
1tsp salt, plus more to sprinkle at the end

Line a square cake tin (mine measures 20cm on each side) with buttered greaseproof paper.

Combine the caster sugar with 30ml water in a saucepan, and bring to the boil over a medium flame. Swirl the pan every now and then, and keep watching it until the sugar starts to change colour. It will quickly work its way from clear to pale gold through to a reddish brown. As soon as it hits the reddish brown point, remove it from the heat and wait for the bubbles to subside.

While the sugar is cooking, melt the brown sugar, butter, cream, syrup and a teaspoon of salt together in a separate pan and stir well. Pour the mixture into the reddish brown caramel and return to the heat with a sugar thermometer. Stir gently to combine the ingredients.

Bring the mixture to a boil and continue to simmer, swirling occasionally, for between 5 and 10 minutes, until the mixture reaches hard ball stage on your sugar thermometer (125°C, 260°F). Remove from the heat and wait for a few minutes until the bubbles in the pan subside. Pour the mixture into the prepared cake tin and cool for an hour or so until the caramel is solid. Cut into pieces and decorate each piece with a pinch of salt. Flaky Maldon salt is fantastic here - and if there's any Hawaiian volcanic salt in your cupboard, now's the time to use it.

Rhubarb and custard cake

There's one seasonal ingredient in the shops at the moment which puts a very jolly spin on February: forced rhubarb. I've been buying it at the market and the supermarket (for some reason, the market produce seems rather redder) to simmer with some sugar to go with yoghurt in the mornings, and with custard at suppertime. We also spooned it over pancakes on Shrove Tuesday - I'm sure I'll be sick of it soon, but we're not there yet, so I chucked some in a cake.

This recipe is based on one I found on Usenet in the mid-nineties. The original was very simple: a box of cake mix, a few handsful of rhubarb, some sugar, and some cream. This is my cake-mix-free version, which is just as quick to prepare. It's lovely and moist, has a fantastic rhubarb and custard flavour, and disappears very quickly.

I don't really understand why you'd spend the extra on a boxed mix, when it only takes a minute to measure out flour, butter, milk and sugar. This also gives your inner control-freak the ability to manage exactly what goes into your cake. A bit of googling revealed that the ingredients panel on a standard box of yellow cake mix reads:

Sugar, Enriched Bleached Wheat Flour (Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Vegetable Oil Shortening (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Propylene Glycol Mono- and Diesters Of Fats, Monoand Diglycerides), Leavening (Sodium Bicarbonate, Dicalcium Phosphate, Sodium Aluminum Phosphat E, Monocalcium Phosphate). Contains 2% Or Less Of: Wheat Starch, Salt, Dextrose, Polyglycerol Esters Of Fatty Acids, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Cellulose Gum, Artificial Flavors, Xanthan Gum, Maltodextrin, Modified Cornstarch, Colored with (Yellow 5 Lake, Red 40 Lake).

Personally, I prefer an ingredients list that goes like this:

250g plain flour
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
125g softened butter
3 eggs
180ml milk
450g caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4-5 stalks rhubarb
1 pint double cream

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F).

Sieve the flour into a large bowl with the baking powder and salt. Give it plenty of height, to get as much air into the flour as possible.

In a separate large bowl, use an electric whisk to cream the butter and 225g of the sugar together until the mixture is pale and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one by one, with the vanilla essence, at a high speed. Add the flour and milk a little at a time, beating as you go, until you have a velvety, light mixture.

Use a spatula to spread the cake mixture over the bottom of a metal baking tin - use a non-stick one, or line with greased parchment. Mine measured 30x35 cm; if yours is smaller, that's fine, but be sure it has reasonably high sides and be aware that your cooking time may be a bit longer. Cut the rhubarb into small pieces and scatter it over the top of the mixture with the remaining sugar. Pour the cream over the whole arrangement and bake for 45 minutes.

Test with a skewer, which should come out nearly clean - if it's still sticky or liquidy when you shake the tin, give the cake another ten minutes and test again. The top will be cracked and golden. This cake is good hot or cold.

Marmalade

I thought I'd missed the Seville orange season, which only lasts for a couple of weeks and starts around the end of January. I'd gone to the market in Cambridge last week, only to find they'd run out. Happily, another box turned up on Saturday, so I snapped up a couple of kilos.

Seville oranges are an unprepossessing fruit, knobbly and scarred-looking, and very puny when held beside the majestic, sterile, navel oranges in the next crate. But Sevilles sell out quickly for a reason. They don't just make gloriously bitter, perfumed marmalade; they're also a wonderful addition to recipes anywhere you might use a lemon, with their tart, fragrant juice.

Making your own marmalade is time-consuming; you'll need to set the best part of a day aside for the project. It's worth the effort, though - and my realisation that 14 jars of amber, jewelled preserves only cost me £7 (£3 for the oranges, £4 for the sugar) has left me full of self-righteousness. It's also a great pleasure to be able to manage the recipe yourself so you can produce your preferred thickness of peel and syrupyness. I like a dense, thick-cut marmalade, of the sort that you just don't seem to be able to buy these days. (So does my lovely Dad, whose name is on several of these jars.) A home-made marmalade, as you'll know if you've ever had one, is much, much tastier than the shop-bought version. I am a purist when it comes to marmalade, and believe it tastes its best when it's made with Seville oranges, sugar and nothing else. You'll find no additions of grapefruit, whisky or ginger here - if you want whisky with your marmalade, pour yourself an accompanying glass.

Two kilos of fruit will produce about 14 jars of marmalade. Split the mixture between large pans if you don't have a big jam pan (if you make a lot of preserves, a jam pan is a worthwhile investment). You'll need:

2kg Seville oranges
3.5 litres water
4kg sugar

Get out your jam pan, and simmer the oranges in the water for 2 hours with a lid on. Remove the fruit from the liquid and slice the oranges in half. Use a fork (and a friend with a fork if you want to get this done quickly, because this is a somewhat tiresome job) to remove the seeds from the centre and put them in a bowl. Put the now seedless pulp from the oranges in another bowl with any juice.

Put all the seeds in a small pan, cover with water and boil vigorously to release the pectin in them for ten minutes while you prepare the skin.

You'll be left with a pile of orange-skin shells. Chop them by hand to your preferred width - some prefer a very finely shredded peel. I like whokking great chunks. Combine the chopped peel with the pulp and put it all back in the water you simmered the whole oranges in with the sugar. Strain the seeds out of the little pan and add the resulting liquid to the marmalade.

Bring the marmalade, stirring initially to dissolve the sugar, to a rolling boil, with the lid off. After 15 minutes, dollop a teaspoon onto a cold saucer. Blow on it until it is cool and give it a poke with a finger to test the set. It probably won't be ready yet - you're looking for a wrinkly surface skin and a lovely amber colour. Test every 15 minutes. When you judge the set to be right (50 minutes/1 hour usually seems to be about right for a thick cut; shredded skin will come ready earlier) remove the pan from the heat, skim any scum off with a slotted spoon to prevent cloudiness, and pour into sterilised jam jars.

Sticky orange and almond cake

This is just great for winter - a great blast of sunny orange flavour, but rather than coming from a delicious healthy glass of juice, it's mediated through a sugary cake, made amazingly moist and dense with ground almonds. Stodge is a very important mood-lifter in the dark evenings of December.

If you have visitors this Christmas who don't like Christmas pudding or Christmas cake, this is a very good alternative. It's rich, heavy and very luxurious in mouth-feel, and while a spoonful of brandy butter or a slug of cream might feel like overkill, it'd be a pretty handsome variety of overkill. If you do plan on making this for Christmas and want to kick it up a level, add three tablespoons of Cointreau or another orange liqueur to the orange juice you pour over at the end, when the cake comes out of the oven. Do not use Blue Curaçao, for obvious reasons.

You'll need:

250g salted butter, softened
225g caster sugar
4 eggs
50g plain flour
200g ground almonds
1 teaspoon almond essence
Zest and juice of 2 oranges
2 tablespoons icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Grease and line a springform tin.

Cream the butter and sugar together until they are pale and fluffy. (You really do need an electric mixer for this recipe, I'm afraid.) Beat the eggs and add them a tablespoon at a time to the butter and sugar mixture along with a tablespoon of flour, whisking as you go and adding more until the last batch is incorporated.

Fold the ground almonds into the batter and add the juice of 1 orange, the zest from both oranges and the almond essence. Stir the liquid ingredients gently and use a spatula to move the cake mixture into the prepared tin.

Bake for 1 hour, checking halfway through to make sure the cake isn't browning too quickly (if it is, just put a tinfoil hat on it). The cake will leave a toothpick pushed into the centre clean when it's ready. Remove from the heat, sprinkle over the icing sugar and poke little holes all over the top of the cake. Strain the juice from the remaining orange to get rid of any pulpy bits and spoon it evenly all over the surface of the cake. Cool in the tin for 20 minutes, remove to a rack and when completely cool, wrap carefully for a few hours before serving to allow the flavours to meld and the stickiness to reach a lovely peak.

Hot buttered rum batter

For years, I thought I didn't like hot buttered rum very much. An oily smear of butter floating on a thin pool of rum-flavoured hot water - nobody's idea of fun. And then last winter, I saw someone in a restaurant at Lake Tahoe (Ciera at the Montbleu hotel - pricey but pleasant) drinking a creamy, hot, cinnamon-smelling glass of something wonderful. I asked the waiter what it was - hot buttered rum. I ordered a glass: rich and buttery, spicy, full of heat and kick from the rum, and silky smooth. How did they get it to emulsify in the glass like that? The waiter said he wasn't allowed to give me a recipe, but did say that the chef made it with a sort of batter he prepared using butter and ice cream, and kept it in the freezer. It's the ice cream which makes the mixture, butter and all, emulsify so pleasingly and creamily in the glass (or mug, if you're at home); and a tub you've made for yourself will keep for months in the freezer, so it's an excellent thing to have on hand for surprise guests. As far as Christmas/winter drinks go, this one's approximately 100% bad for you (do not do what I did last night and have four of them in a row if you don't want to feel a bit unwell), which unfortunately means it's also about 100% delicious.

I made up a few different sets of batter from recipes I found on the Internet. None of them really hit the spot; in common with a lot of American recipes, I found most of them very, very sweet and a bit bland, relying on the vanilla ice cream for much of their flavour. The recipe below is my take on things, rather less sugary than most of the US recipes. I've also used maple syrup along with soft brown sugar for its flavour; and I've spiced quite aggressively, especially when it comes to the nutmeg, which has a wonderful affinity with rum. Allspice, like the rum, is Jamaican in origin, and works incredibly well here. And don't save this mixture just for dolloping in your hot rum and water: as I write this, I'm drinking a lump of the stuff dissolved in a strong mug of coffee, and it's heavenly.

Things like this make winter a bit less grim.

To make just over a litre of batter to keep in the freezer, you'll need:

500ml vanilla ice cream
500g salted butter, softened
200g soft brown sugar
200ml maple syrup
1½ tablespoons allspice
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
1 whole nutmeg, grated

Let the ice cream sit at room temperature until it's the texture of whipped cream. (You can also make this once the ice cream is completely melted, but I prefer the lighter texture you can achieve using a half-melted tub.) In a large bowl, use an electric whisk to cream together the butter, brown sugar and maple syrup until you have a thick, fluffy mixture. Dump the spices on top with the ice cream and continue to whisk for about five minutes, until the batter is smooth and light. Transfer to containers for freezing.

When you come to make up your drink, just put a dollop of the mixture at the bottom of a mug or glass (I like about three heaped teaspoons in a small mug - your mileage may vary) and add a measure of rum with a small pinch of salt. The salt won't make the drink salty, but it will act to lift the buttery flavour. Pour over water straight from the kettle to fill the mug, stir until the batter is dissolved, sit down in front of the fire and get drinking.

Peach and papaya jam

Don't you hate it when the light starts slanting to remind you it's autumn? This recipe catches the last of the really summery peaches and preserves them with a sugary papaya so you can enjoy them in the dead of winter with toast. I'm blowing my own trumpet a bit here, but I was simply amazed at how good this combination is - this is an extraordinarily good jam, packed with peachy aroma and body.

It's nice here if you can find some white peaches (or nectarines) as well as some yellow ones. The fruit will be suspended in little chunks in the amber jam, and it's nice to have a little variety in colour to look at. Peaches and papaya aren't particularly rich in pectin, and they're very, very sweet, so there's less sugar here than you might expect; I have also added a supplementary apple with the juice of a lemon to add a little tartness and that all-important pectin for setting.

As with all jams, make sure you stir this constantly with a wooden spoon as it cooks to avoid burning the bottom of your pan. If you make a lot of jam (or even if you only make a bit), it's a really good idea to spend a few pounds on a jam thermometer rather than relying on the cold saucer method, where you drip a little jam onto a cold object to see whether it's setting properly.

To make about 2kg jam, you'll need:

1 ripe papaya
2 ripe yellow peaches
2 ripe white peaches
1 small, tart apple
Juice of 1 lemon
Sugar (you'll need to work out the weight - see below)

Sterilise some jars and a ladle.

Peel and seed the fruits. This is very easy with a peach - just quarter it and you should be able to peel the skin away with your fingers. Chop the flesh into chunks, being careful to reserve the juice. Weigh the fruit and any juice, and measure out some sugar weighing ¾ as much as the fruit. (In many jam recipes you'd use equal amounts of fruit and sugar, but these are very sweet fruits, and they don't need the help!)

Pour the fruit, the lemon juice and the sugar into a saucepan with a jam thermometer, and bring to 110°C (230°F). The faster you can get it to temperature, the better the colour of the fruit will be preserved. Ladle the hot jam into jars, topping with a wax disc if you like, and seal immediately.

Chocolate banana bread

Bananas, white and milk chocolate chunks, and a sugary, crispy crust. What's not to like? This is a pleasingly easy recipe, and I was very pleased with the reaction when I came up with it the other evening - the entire loaf vanished before I was able to boil the kettle for a pot of tea.

For one disappearing banana miracle loaf, you'll need:

3 ripe bananas
100g white chocolate
100g milk chocolate
180g plain flour
150g soft light brown sugar + 2 tablespoons to sprinkle
40g salted butter (softened)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

Preheat the oven to 190°C (375°F). Grease a 9×5 inch loaf tin.

Sift the flour from a height into a large bowl with the bicarbonate of soda and baking powder. In another bowl, use an electric mixer to cream the sugar and butter together until they are pale in colour. Use the back of a fork to mash the bananas, and use the mixer to whip them into the butter and sugar mixture for two minutes.

Wallop the chocolate, still in its packets, with a rolling pin to reduce it to chunks. (This is a lot cheaper than buying dedicated chunks for baking, and the chocolate will probably be of a higher quality too.) Use a spatula to fold the chocolate chunks and contents of the banana bowl into the flour as gently as you can - if you've ever eaten a disappointingly solid banana bread it's almost certainly because the batter has been overhandled. Use the spatula to shuffle the mixture into the loaf tin, sprinkle the top with the extra sugar and bake on a middle shelf of the oven for 45 minutes. Check a skewer comes out clean - if it doesn't, pop a piece of tin foil on top of the tin to stop the top from going too brown and add another 10 minutes to the cooking time. Cool for quarter of an hour in the tin, then move to a rack to finish cooling (or eat immediately, which is what we did, and very nice it was too).

Gooseberry fool

We English diners aren't blessed with much, but we're pretty blessed when it comes to summer fruits. We've been through rhubarb, strawberries, cherries and greengages already this summer: now it's the turn of the gooseberry.

There are several different varieties of this lovely, fragrant berry, some very sharp and best used for cooking (they're very good simmered down and served with rich meats like duck and goose), and some so sweet they can be eaten raw. Its flavour character and the texture it cooks down to means that it fits well into the sort of recipes you might cook with rhubarb - and if you don't have any gooseberries, you can make this fool with rhubarb and emerge happy. I very much like the texture of the soft seeds and flesh of the fruit in the mouth, and don't sieve the gooseberry puree in this recipe to remove them. Try it both ways, and see which you prefer.

Gooseberries have a fantastic affinity with elderflower. It's just one of those happy coincidences, like strawberries and black pepper (try it some time). If you made the elderflower cordial I encourage you to make every June (or if you have some from the supermarket in the cupboard), use two tablespoons of it in place of the sugar in this recipe. To serve two, you'll need:

450g dessert gooseberries
2 tablespoons sugar OR elderflower cordial
400ml whipping cream
400ml custard - make the custard using this recipe or buy some from the supermarket chiller cabinet

Top and tail the gooseberries with a sharp knife, and put them in a small saucepan. Add the sugar or elderflower cordial to them and put over a low heat. As they simmer, the berries will collapse into a thick sauce. Remove from the heat, taste for sweetness, adding a little more sugar or cordial if necessary, transfer to a bowl and put the gooseberries into the fridge to chill for a couple of hours. Make up the custard and put it in the fridge to chill with the berries.

When the gooseberries and custard are nice and cold, whip the cream into soft peaks. In glasses, layer the custard, gooseberries and cream to serve. Some like to swirl them in the glass, but I think this is far prettier served in distinct layers.

Greengage jam

Summer's been a bit of a washout here, but it turns out that the hot start and wet middle and end of the season have meant that the plum harvest this year has been stupendous. (So has the wasp harvest, so be careful if you're collecting your own.) I don't have my own plum tree, but I've been scrumping plums from trees in a neighbour's garden across the green that overhang a footpath, eating them at friends' houses, and buying bushels of the things at the market.

Greengages are my favourite English plum. They're (surprise!) pale green, extraordinarily sweet, and wonderfully juicy, with golden flesh when ripe. Like Victoria plums, they're perfect for jam-making, keeping a lovely plummy fragrance when cooked down. They're very obliging fruits; they're full of pectin, so you won't need to add any setting agents to the jam; and you don't even need to stone them before cooking, as the stones will loosen themselves for you as the fruit cooks down, floating to the top of the jam so you can skim them off as they bob to the surface.

I like the pure plum flavour you get from this jam, but some people like to add a vanilla pod to the saucepan for some extra fragrance. For me, it's not the best use of an expensive pod; this jam just employs greengages, water and sugar, and it's none the worse for that. When selecting your greengages, try to find fruits which are ripe but not over-squishy, and reject any with bruises or mouldy bits, as this will affect the length of time your jam will keep once opened.

I find it hard to think about preserves (especially fruit ones) in terms of kilogrammes and litres, so I'm afraid you'll need to dig out the imperial weights for this one. To make jam from 2lb of ripe greengages, making about 3lb jam, you'll need:

2lb greengages
1½ lb granulated sugar
½ pint water

Sterilise some jars before you begin. Put the whole greengages and the water in a large pan, and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the fruits are very soft. Pour in the sugar, stir well and simmer hard, fishing out the stones as they bob to the surface, until the mixture reaches a jam set (it should measure 110°C on a jam thermometer; if you don't have one, just dribble a bit of the jam onto a cold saucer and check that it's reached a jammy texture). Skim any scum off the surface and pour into the sterilised jars, sealing immediately.

This is, of course, gorgeous on toast, crumpets or a croissant; my favourite thing to do with this jam is to dollop a big tablespoonful into the middle of a bowl of plain yoghurt for breakfast.

Chilli choc chip cookies

Chillies and chocolate have a lovely affinity; they're a traditional pairing in South America, where the locals really know how to treat their cocoa. I was making up a traditional toll house cookie recipe - actually, it's the traditional toll house cookie recipe, as I'll explain below - yesterday with Dr W (the family that bakes together stays together), and decided to augment the recipe with some fresh Scotch bonnet chillies. Wonderful and potent little balls of fire, they're one of my favourite chillies. If you've not tried them before, be cautious, especially if you find chillies hard to tolerate; these are hot, rocking up at between 100,000 and 350,000 Scoville Units. (The humble jalapeño only rates at between 2,500 and 8,000 Scoville Units, for the sake of comparison.)

Scotch bonnets are closely related to the habanero, but have a very distinct flavour and aroma, fruity and sweet behind all the heat, which I think is just wonderful against chocolate. I've only used one here, chopped very finely and creamed in with the butter so its powerful capsaicin (the stuff that burns your tongue off), which is fat-soluble, can work its way smoothly through the cookie dough. The chocolate chunks are a good milk chocolate - nice and smoothly cooling on your tongue against the chilli heat.

The basic recipe I've used here is the original toll house cookie recipe - I've never found a better. The Toll House was a restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, where Ruth Wakefield, one of the owners, was responsible for all the recipes. She came up with this recipe around 1930. Nestle bought the rights to the recipe in 1939 - this ingredients list is from Ruth's original recipe from the 1947 edition of Toll House Tried and True Recipes, where she calls them Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookies. (As well as adding the chillies, I have left out a cup of chopped pecan nuts from the recipe - if you want to use them, stir them in with the chocolate bits.) Ruth preferred very tiny, crisp cookies, and only used half a teaspoon of batter for each one, with a much shorter spell in the oven. I like them quite a lot bigger for the squashy middle, and suspect you will too - if you want to make teeny cookies, reduce the cooking time.

To make about 20 cookies, you'll need:

1 Scotch bonnet pepper
2¼ cups plain flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
¾ cup granulated sugar
¾ cup firmly-packed light brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups plus 2 tablespoons chocolate morsels (I used two bars of Green & Black's cook's milk chocolate, walloped into rough chunks with a rolling pin while still in the wrappers)

Preheat the oven to 190°C (375°F).

Chop the chilli very finely, discarding the seeds if you want to cut the heat down a bit. Sift the flour and salt together in one bowl. In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter and the chilli with an electric mixer (this should take about 2 minutes). Add the sugars gradually, creaming the mixture together until light and fluffy. Beat the vanilla and eggs (one at a time) into the mixture, then the baking soda. Turn the speed of your mixer down to low and add a third of the flour, then gradually add the rest. Stir in the chocolate pieces and drop heaping tablespoons of the mixture onto baking sheets about 2 inches apart to leave space for the cookies to spread.

Bake for between 8 and 10 minutes, until the edges and tops are just turning golden. Allow to cool on the baking sheets for a few minutes so they can firm up a little, then use a spatula to move the cookies to cooling racks (or direct to your mouth).

These are a lovely, crumbly, squashy cookie. They'll keep in an airtight container for about a week.

Strawberry lemonade

Yes, those are LEGO ice cubes. What of it?

This hot summer has meant that we've been blessed with some truly gorgeous strawberries this year - fat, fragrant, juicy and sweet. If you have a glut, this lemonade is so delicious you may well find yourself drinking it instead of eating a dessert. A shot of vodka in the bottom of the glass wouldn't go amiss either.

I've used the strawberry variety called Florence here, which is more fragrant and flavourful than Elsanta (the potato-ish variety you are most likely to come across in the shops). This method, though, where you will find yourself macerating the chopped berries in sugar overnight, makes the most of even Elsanta. Macerating somehow makes them much fruitier in flavour, so use whatever variety you can get your hands on.

To make a jug of lemonade large enough for four glasses, you'll need:

2 punnets of strawberries (about 500g)
4 heaped tablespoons caster sugar
Juice of 2 lemons
Water

Slice the strawberries into four or five pieces each, and sprinkle generously with the sugar in a large bowl. Mix well with a spoon, making sure every piece of fruit is well sugared, then cover the bowl with cling film and chill in the fridge for about 24 hours, until you are ready to make the lemonade.

When you come to put the lemonade together, pour the pink syrup that will have developed in the strawberry bowl (see picture) into a large jug, and transfer the macerated strawberries themselves to a sieve, making sure you catch any drips in a bowl. Use the back of a ladle to push the strawberries (which will have become very soft in the sugar bath) through the sieve into a bowl until you are left with the seeds and a stiff pulp in the sieve, which you can discard.

Add the pureed strawberries to the syrup in the jug and squeeze in the juice of two lemons. Now add between 1 and 2 glasses of water to the jug (the mixture will be too sweet and sharp without dilution) until you reach a level of flavour you find just right - amounts will vary depending on the particular strawberries you have chosen. Stir well and serve immediately with ice. This drink is unspeakably good packed into a Thermos flask for a picnic - give the Thermos a swift shake before pouring if you use one.

Flapjacks

I had an email a couple of weeks ago from a lady from Mornflake oats, asking if I'd like some samples. Now, I was a big fan of Mornflake as a kid, when the sixth-formers at school had a weekly stall in the dining room where they sold us teenies snacks of the very limited sort allowed by our health-fascist teachers. There wasn't much that was very good - nobody really liked licorice twigs, and I would sooner die than ever have to eat a carob bar again. Happily, there was one thing on sale I loved without measure - a muesli made by Mornflake with oat clusters, coconut, and chunks of candied papaya and pineapple. Infinitely better for breakfast than school gruel.

I suspect my waxing lyrical about a childhood affection for Mornflake pressed some buttons, because the next morning three cubic feet of oat products arrived on the doorstep. Since then, I've been happily munching my way through some really fantastic muesli (the Swiss style is creamy and delicious with the traditional Swiss addition of milk powder, the Fig and Apple is gloriously crispy and tastes divine), oatbran flakes (Very Berry, with strawberries, raspberries and cherries were Dr W's favourite) and porridge - microwavable single portions in packets, bags of rolled oats, and fine oatbran sprinkles for smooth porridges or garnishes. My cholesterol level is at an all-time low. Mornflake are a considerably older company than I'd realised; the same family has been milling oats for more than 14 generations, and they've just celebrated their 333rd anniversary, making them the UK's eighth-oldest company. The folks at Mornflake tell me that oats will reduce my appetite, keeping me slim and gorgeous (a recent study from King's College London has identified a hunger-suppressing hormone in oats, which, along with their cholesterol-squelching action appear to be almost sinister in their healthiness). They would also like you to know that a very varied assortment of people, including such luminaries as Tim Henman, Orlando Bloom, David Cameron, Kate Moss and Madonna, have gone on the record as being fans of porridge. I am not sure that this brings anything in particular to your own breakfast experience, but it may be useful for your next pub quiz.

Even after two weeks of artery-cleansing, appetite-suppressing, celebrity-endorsed oaten breakfasts, I still have a goodly portion of Mornflake's oaten bounty left in the breakfast cupboard. Happily, there's something really unhealthy and extremely delicious you can do with an awful lot of oats - make an awful lot of flapjacks.

Flapjacks are fast, easy and will make your house smell deliciously of caramel as they cook. To make 25, you'll need:

275g rolled oats
225g salted butter
225g demerara sugar
2 heaped tablespoons golden syrup

Preheat the oven to 160°C and grease a 30 x 20cm baking tin. Melt the butter, sugar and syrup together in a saucepan over a low heat, and stir the oats into the molten mixture, making sure everything is well blended. Pack the oats into the greased tin, pressing down with the back of a spoon to make sure the mixture is firm and flat on the top.

Bake the flapjacks for 35 minutes, until they are a golden caramel brown. (Overcooking will make your flapjacks hard and dark - 35 minutes will give you crisp edges and a nice squashy middle, but some people prefer a crispier flapjack, so adjust the cooking time to your liking.) Remove from the oven and leave in the tin for ten minutes, then use a spatula to mark the flapjacks into 25 squares. Allow the flapjacks to cool completely before moving them into an airtight tin (or cramming the lot into your face - I'll leave it up to you).

Fruit scones for cream tea

One of my sad, sad weekend hobbies is wandering around National Trust properties, buying a sack of books at the inevitable second-hand bookshop and then visiting the tea-room for a handsome cream tea, with fluffy scones, strawberry jam and plenty of clotted cream to slather on top. If you're in East Anglia, the exquisite Oxburgh Hall, where you'll find a number of embroideries worked by Mary Queen of Scots and Bess of Hardwick, a priest hole you can clamber into and a very fine garden, has a really fabulous tearoom. Ickworth House (English wines, fantastic gardens, wonderful collection of fans) and Wimpole Hall (organic farm, hot-dogs made from the pigs you have just fed pig-nuts to in the barn) also do a very good line in cream teas - but to my mind Oxburgh's intimate tearoom, housed in the hall's old kitchens, complete with antique bread ovens and blue and white crockery displaying pictures of the hall itself, still takes the...cake. All the same, while it's nice to visit Oxburgh once or twice a year (those gardens change gorgeously in character over the seasons), I can't really justify driving an hour just for a cup of tea and a scone more regularly than that. Time to get baking.

I usually choose a pot of Earl Grey to go with my scones. So when, in the absence of a National Trust tearoom, I decided to prepare my own cream tea at home this weekend, I decided to use some very strong Earl Grey to soak the sultanas in before adding them to the dough. With a pot of tea, a jar of good strawberry jam (try Tiptree's Little Scarlet or Duchy Originals Strawberry) and some clotted cream (increasingly available in supermarkets and delis - if you can't find any, use extra-thick double cream rather than whipped cream, which has exactly the wrong texture), you'll find yourself in possession of one of the finest things you can eat in the afternoon.

A quick note on the egg in the dough. I was lucky enough to have a box of bantam eggs a neighbour had given me, and used two - bantam eggs are tiny, very yolky and rich, and two are approximately the same volume as a single large hen's egg. If you can find bantam eggs, I'd recommend using two in this recipe.

To make about 16 scones, you'll need:

225g plain flour
2½ teaspoons baking powder
50g butter
25g caster sugar
1 large egg OR two bantam eggs
Milk (enough to make up 150ml when added to the beaten egg)
100g sultanas
1 large cup strong Earl Grey tea

Start by brewing the tea (make yourself a cup to drink while you're at it) and preheating the oven to 220°C (425°F). When the tea is nice and strong, pour it over the sultanas in a bowl and leave them to plump up for half an hour while you prepare the dough for the scones.

Sieve the flour and baking powder into a bowl, and cut the softened butter into it in little chunks. Rub the butter into the flour mixture until it resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar.

When the sultanas have had half an hour in the tea, drain them in a seive and add them to the flour mixture. In a measuring jug, beat the egg. Top the beaten egg up with the milk until you have 150ml of liquid, and stir it gradually into the flour mixture (you may not need all of it), mixing all the time with a wooden spoon, until you have a soft dough that holds together but is not sticky. Try not to over-handle the dough so that your scones are light and fluffy. Roll the dough out on a floured surface to a thickness of about 1cm, and cut out rounds with a 5cm circular cutter.

Place the rounds onto greased baking sheets and brush the tops with any remaining milk/egg mixture (if you have none left, plain milk will do). Bake for 10 minutes until golden brown.

These scones are at their very best served as soon as they come out of the oven, split in half, spread with jam and cream. Once cooled, they'll keep for a couple of days in an airtight tin.

Iced sugar cookies

These little cookies are delicious, easy to make, fun to ice, and will keep for about a week in an airtight tin. What's not to like? Even I, who singularly lack artistic skill, a steady hand or any visual imagination at all, had a total blast making a big batch of these for Dr W's birthday.

You'll be using royal icing and flood icing to colour these in. Piped lines of royal icing make little reservoirs which you will later fill with flood icing - royal icing which has been watered down a very little to make it flow into the shape you've outlined. I like to use squeezy bottles for icing rather than an icing bag (much less messy). Bottles are available at most cookware shops for under £2, and they come with a plastic piping nozzle which is perfect for this job. The amount of icing in the recipe below should be sufficient for filling six bottles in different colours, first for outlining, then, with a little water, for flooding.

It's important to use food colouring that won't dilute and loosen your icing. Gel icings, which come in tiny round pots to be added to your plain icing with a toothpick, are simply brilliant. I got Wilton's set of eight gel colours from good old Amazon, and used a licorice pen (from the Elizabeth David shop in Cambridge) for black detail like eyes and buttons. Eight colours will probably be more than you'll need for any single project, and the pots, although tiny, last for a very long time; you only need the tiniest dot of colouring for a batch of icing. Make sure that you blend the colour with the icing as thoroughly as you can; you don't want any streaky bits.

Sugar cookies
300g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
230g vanilla sugar
230g butter
1 egg
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Royal icing (see instructions below for flood icing)
1lb powdered sugar
5 tablespoons meringue powder (available at cookware shops and some supermarkets)
2 tablespoons water

Start by baking the cookies. Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Sieve the flour and baking powder together and put to one side. Cream the sugar and the room-temperature butter with an electric whisk. Add the egg and vanilla extract, and continue to whisk until everything is blended together. Gradually add the flour mixture, beating gently until it is all incorporated.

Roll the dough onto a floured board and use cookie cutters to cut out shapes. Lay out on greaseproof paper on baking sheets and bake for about 12 minutes. Leave the cooked cookies on the sheet for a few minutes to cool a little and firm up, then use a spatula to transfer them to a cooling rack.

While the cookies cool, make the icing by beating together the sugar, meringue and water with your electric whisk until the mixture reaches stiff peaks (this can take several minutes). The icing will keep, covered, in the fridge for a week, so you can make and colour it before making the cookies if you fancy. Colour the icing according to the instructions on the gel colouring pack. Divide the icing between squeezy bottles, and get to work piping outlines on all your cookies - make sure there are no gaps in your outlines for the flood icing to dribble out of later.

The piped icing should dry quite quickly, so you can start filling in with flood icing as soon as you're finished outlining. To turn the royal icing you outlined with into flood icing, add water a drop at a time and mix well until you have an icing just loose enough to flow when drizzled onto a flat surface. Squiggle flood icing into each outlined area, and use a toothpick to encourage it into the corners.

You can drop contrasting colours of flood icing into flood icing that is still wet to create certain effects. Make lines of wet icing and drag with a toothpick for a feathered effect; or try dripping a single drop of icing in a contrasting colour into wet icing for neat dots.

Edible sprinkles are a lovely, lily-gilding addition too. To stick them onto the cookies, wait for the icing to dry, then mix a teaspoon of meringue powder with a couple of drops of water, until you have a sticky paste. Use a kids' paintbrush to apply this meringue glue to the area you want to stick sprinkles to, and scatter the sprinkles over while the glue is still wet.

When the icing and sprinkly bits are dry, store the cookies in single layers between sheets of greaseproof paper in an airtight tin.

Hot cross buns

I know - hot cross buns are really cheap at the supermarket, so why would you bother making your own at home?

There's a very easy answer: home-made hot cross buns are unbelievably delicious (unlike the supermarket variety, these are enriched with butter and eggs, and have more in the way of spices and fruit in their dough) - far better than the bought variety. They're cheap, too. And if you're interested in cooking something that will make your house smell divine for an afternoon, hot cross buns are just the ticket.

These sweet, yeasty little buns are a treat for Lent. (Pipe a Darwin fish on yours if you do not subscribe to this religious baking stuff.) According to Elizabeth David, the hot cross bun was a cause of great concern among the Protestant monarchs of England - Catholics were rumoured to bake them using communion wafers, and all that doughy symbolism was immensely threatening. The Tudors actually tried to ban them, but the populace would not be fobbed off with toasted teacakes, and eventually Elizabeth I passed a law allowing bakeries to make them at Easter and Christmas.

To make 12 hot cross buns, you'll need:

Starter
7g (1 sachet) easy-blend yeast
1 teaspoon soft brown sugar
100g strong white flour
200ml blood-hot milk

Dough
350g white bread flour
1 pinch salt
½ nutmeg, grated
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon allspice
Zest of one lemon and one orange
50g salted butter, cut into small pieces
50g light brown soft sugar
90g candied mixed peel
90g sultanas
1 egg

Piping
3 tablespoons plain flour
3 tablespoons caster sugar
Water

Glaze
1 orange
75g caster sugar
100 ml water

Get your yeast going by mixing it with all the starter ingredients in a small bowl, and leave it in a warm place to start working for fifteen minutes while you prepare the rest of the dough for the buns.

Mix the flour for the dough in a large bowl with the spices, pinch of salt and the citrus zests. Rub the butter, cut into small pieces, into the flour and spice mixture as if you are making pastry. When the mixture resembles breadcrumbs, stir through the sugar, peel and sultanas. Check that the yeasty starter mixture has plenty of large bubbles on the surface, and add it and the beaten egg to the dough mixture. Mix well with a wooden spoon, and when everything is amalgamated, start to knead the mixture with your hands.

Knead for ten minutes until you have a soft dough which is no longer sticky, and which stretches easily. (If after five minutes or so of kneading the dough still seems very sticky, add a little more flour - bread doughs will vary enormously in stickiness depending on variables like the humidity outside and the temperature in your kitchen.) Oil a bowl, and put the kneaded dough inside with some oiled cling film or a damp teatowel on top. Leave the dough for about an hour and a half in a warm place until it has risen to double its original size.

Knock the dough down, and make twelve round balls from it. Arrange them evenly in a baking dish, cover again and leave to double in size again in a warm place (between an hour and an hour and a half).

Preheat the oven to 220°C (425°F). When the buns have risen, make a paste for the crosses from flour and caster sugar, adding water until it is stiff and pipable. Using a piping bag or a freezer bag with a hole snipped in the corner, pipe crosses on each bun.

Bake the buns for 15-20 minutes until they are golden. While the buns are baking, take the zest and juice of the orange for the glaze and simmer it with the water and sugar until you have a light syrup. Brush the hot syrup over the hot buns when they come out of the oven.

You can serve these immediately or cool and toast them. Either way, they're glorious with a big slab of butter.

Lemon curd

Have you ever had one of those days when you've suddenly noticed that you've accidentally bought fifteen lemons? I had one of those on Friday, and decided to use the lemons life had given me to make some lemonade. (Dead easy - maple syrup and lemon juice in iced water to taste.) There were still lemons left over. I decided to test one of the heavy pans in the new Le Creuset Satin Black glaze that Dr W (the wonderful, thoughtful Dr W) bought me for my birthday; they promise to be good at distributing a very slow, even heat. Perfect for lemon curd.

If you're lucky enough to be able to get your hands on American Meyer lemons (a superbly lemonsome lemon) or thick-skinned, aromatic Sicilian lemons, you should immediately drop everything else you're doing and use them to make curd. It's a wonderful part of the English nursery tea - try it as a spread on some good, crusty toast, along with a cup of Earl Grey tea. The aromatic lemon zest in the curd and the bergamot in the tea are perfect partners.

You probably have all the ingredients you need to make lemon curd in the house already (although Meyer or Sicilian lemons are best, any unwaxed lemon will make a delicious curd), and it's very quick - it should only take you about 40 minutes, at most, from the time you start to zest your lemons to the satisfying moment when you ladle the lovely primrose goo into jars. Home-made lemon curd is a million times nicer than the shop-bought stuff, and lasts for about six weeks in the fridge. To make about 1.25 kg of lemon curd, you'll need:

4 lemons
4 large eggs
350g caster sugar
250g butter
2 teaspoons cornflour

Start by breaking the eggs into a heavy saucepan away from the heat. Beat the eggs thoroughly with a balloon whisk. Tip the grated zest and juice of the lemons over the eggs with the sugar, the butter, cut into tiny cubes, and the cornflour. (Strictly speaking, the cornflour is a cheat's ingredient - it doesn't add any flavour, and all the thickening comes from the eggs, but the cornflour provides a guarantee that your curd will not curdle. I've never had a lemon curd go wrong with a small addition of cornflour.)

Put the saucepan over a medium/low heat, and start to go at it with a balloon whisk. Whisk constantly until the butter has all melted. After another eight minutes or so of hard whisking, the curd will start to thicken. Turn the heat down to its minimum and keep on whisking, making sure you get into every corner of the pan, for another three minutes or so, until the curd is deliciously thick (it will continue to thicken as it cools down). Ladle immediately into sterilised jars and refrigerate once cool.

Rhubarb crumble with proper custard

The forced rhubarb is arriving in the shops at the moment. It's a lovely delicate pink when raw, and can tend to lose its colour a bit when cooked, unlike the very red rhubarb from later in the season - but it tastes deliciously of spring and makes a great crumble (or crisp, as the Americans call it). The lovely buttery, crunchy topping is impossible to get wrong, and this is a good recipe to start kids on before they try to make pastry, so they can get used to the rubbing-in method.

The custard below is made in the traditional way with egg yolks, vanilla and milk, but also includes a spoonful of Bird's instant custard. The Bird's, full of cornflour, stabilises the other custard ingredients as well as adding some flavour, so you'll end up with a supremely custardy custard, rich, silky and packed with vanilla. Alfred Bird, a chemist, came up with his custard powder in 1837, because his wife loved custard but was allergic to eggs: a romantic gesture that's still going strong after nearly two centuries. Mrs Bird is no longer with us, so additional yolks are not an insensitive addition.

For this first crumble of the year, I wanted the buttery, clear taste of the crumble topping to shine against the fragrant spring rhubarb, so this is a plain topping with a rhubarb-only filling. If you want to jazz things up a bit, try adding a couple of teaspoons of ground ginger to the topping and two or three tablespoons of crystallised ginger to the filling. To serve six, you'll need:

Crumble
225g plain flour
75g softened, salted butter
75g soft brown sugar
900g trimmed rhubarb
75g caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Slice the rhubarb into one-inch chunks. Place in a saucepan and sprinkle over the caster sugar. Cook gently, covered (you don't need any extra water because there is so much in the rhubarb) for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the rhubarb is cooked but still chunky.

While the rhubarb is simmering, make the topping in a large bowl by rubbing the butter into the flour gently, using your fingertips, until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Stir the sugar through the crumble mixture.

Put the rhubarb in a shallow cooking dish (I like my le Creuset tatin dish for this) and sprinkle the topping over. Scatter a few drips of water from the tips of your fingers over the surface - this roughens up the top and makes things even crispier. Bake for 30-40 minutes until the crumble topping is golden brown.

Custard
2 tablespoons Bird's custard powder
1 vanilla pod
1 pint milk
3 egg yolks
2 tablespoons vanilla sugar

Mix the sugar and custard powder in a bowl with a little milk taken from the pint until you have a smooth paste. Bring the rest of the milk to a bare simmer (it should be giggling rather than chuckling) and pour it over the mixture in the bowl. Return the whole lot to the saucepan over a low heat and, whisking hard, add the egg yolks and the seeds from inside the vanilla pod to the mixture. Keep cooking until the custard thickens and serve immediately. (If you need to keep the custard warm for a while before serving, lay a piece of cling film directly on its surface to avoid forming a skin.)

English pancakes

Tomorrow is Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras, which much of the world celebrates with colourful parades, loud music and women baring their boobs in return for beads. In the UK, we just eat pancakes.

I don't hold with this giving-things-up-for-Lent business. Pancake Day is meant to be a way to use up all the good things in your larder before embarking on 40 days of mealy-mouthed asceticism. Having given up giving-things-up for Lent myself, I like to eat pancakes year-round, but if you're one of those for whom this is a once-a-year treat, here's a recipe for some lovely, lacy pancakes flavoured with orange flower water, which makes them light and delicately floral. In the picture above, I've stuffed them with whipped Chantilly cream (whip the cream as usual, but add a tablespoon of caster sugar and a few drops of vanilla essence to every pint) and blueberries, then drizzled them with maple syrup, but there are plenty of other simple fillings you can try:

• Lemon juice (or lime juice) and sugar
• A couple of tablespoons of juice straight from an orange with a sprinkle of sugar and a few more drops of orange flower water
• Melted butter and caster sugar
• Sweet chestnut purée
• Maple syrup and bananas
• Golden syrup
• Strawberry jam and cream

To make about 12 pancakes, you'll need:

220g plain flour
½ teaspoon salt
4 large eggs
550ml whole milk
2 tablespoons orange flower water
Shortening or vegetable oil for cooking the pancakes (shortening is best)

Sieve the flour and salt into a bowl, and make a well in the middle. Break the eggs into the well and whisk with a balloon whisk, pouring the milk in gradually. Eventually, you should have a smooth batter about the same consistency as single cream. Stir the orange flower water into the batter. This batter doesn't need to stand before you use it.

Heat about 1 tablespoon of shortening in a large pan over a high heat. The pan should be as hot as you can get it if you don't want your first pancake to be a flabby disaster. Swirl about ⅓ of a ladle of the batter around the pan (adjust the amount for smaller pans). You should have not quite enough batter to make it to the edges of the pan if you want to have a lacy pancake with a delicate frilly, crisp edge. Flip the pancake over after about 45 seconds. I always use a spatula for this operation, having experienced a childhood pancake/ceiling incident - if you are brave and strong in the wrist, toss the pancake in the pan. Cook the raw side for another 45 seconds, and slide out onto a plate.

We usually eat these one by one as quickly as I can cook them, but if you want to make a great heap of pancakes and serve them all at once, you can wrap the pancakes in foil and keep them in a very low oven, although this does some violence to the lovely crisp edges. It's best to eat them straight from the pan for the best texture.

Mrs Charles Darwin's Recipe Book - Baked apple pudding

I note that every year, all good intentions aside, I encounter a total failure to blog the moment I get on skis. Apologies - put it down to grotty resort food; the protein-hunger you get with after a day of exercise which kills off any ability to distinguish between the delicious and the simply calorific; and general exhaustion. (Honestly; you're lucky I'm blogging now. I swear that jetlag only gets worse as you get older.)

I've a few more posts from my American odyssey to bring you, but I'll intersperse them with some recipes and non-US reviews - like today's. Just in time for the Darwin bicentennial, I was invited to the launch of a new edition of Mrs. Charles Darwin's Recipe Book: Revived and Illustrated in Cambridge. I cursed a bit about not being able to make it (I was at Disneyland that day - which although fabulous, doesn't have any food worth writing about besides candy floss, popcorn and California's greasiest wurst), and was delighted to find a copy of the book on the doorstep when I got back home.

When we consider the lives of the great and the good, it doesn't usually occur to us to wonder what they ate. I mean - think of Darwin, and what comes to mind? I bet it'll be a list along the lines of On The Origin of Species, Galapagos finches, the Beagle, beards - we dehumanise our icons and reduce them to a series of cyphers.

Emma Darwin's little recipe notebook offers a fascinating and humanising glimpse into the family's domestic life. They're commonplace, simple Victorian recipes - it's the notebook of a charmingly ordinary woman. This edition expands the little book into a good-sized, handsome cookbook by reproducing many of her handwritten pages, alongside some great food photography, some very pretty contemporary prints of ingredients like chickens and celery, and detailed notes by the editors on each recipe. There are fascinating peeps into the Darwins' domestic life here - you may well be aware that Darwin sufferered for much of his life from a mysterious illness he is thought to have picked up in Brazil, but probably didn't know that his doctors forbade him from eating pork (he ignored them in the case of bacon), or that he blamed rhubarb for some of his stomach problems.

Here's Emma's recipe for a baked apple pudding in batter. The editors suggest you use well-flavoured dessert apples, and serve with a sprinkling of sugar and plenty of cream. To serve six, you'll need:

6 apples
2 tablespoons sugar, plus more for sprinkling
½ teaspoon finely grated lemon peel
1 tablespoon butter
3 ounces (75 g) flour
1 cup (250 ml) milk
2 eggs

Grease an ovenproof dish deep enough to hold the apples and batter. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C).

Peel and core the apples. Place them in the prepared dish. In each hole, put a teaspoon of sugar, a little grated lemon peel, and top with a small piece of butter. Bake for 20 minutes. Remove the apples from the oven and raise the temperature to 400°F (200°C).

While the apples are baking, sift the flour into a bowl and make a well in the centre. Add the milk, a little at a time, and mix to a smooth batter. Beat in the eggs, one at a time.

Pour the batter over the apples and bake for about 30 minutes, or until well risen and brown on top. Sprinkle with sugar and serve at once with cream.

Cherry-marzipan Christmas cookies

This one's for marzipan lovers. I love almonds and cherries, and there's something undeniably Christmas-y about the combination. To kick the Christmas angle up a notch, I spent a while experimenting with marzipan, and I've worked out a method that makes marzipan pieces melt into the cookie dough in a gooey, puffy fashion.

I've used sweetened, dried sour cherries, which are now readily available in the baking sections of supermarkets in little metallised plastic packets. They're a very different beast from glacé cherries, and retain a tart bite and juicy plumpness, which is a brilliant contrast to the sweet marzipan and sugary cookie dough. Ground almonds and egg whites give these a near-macaroon texture. They're light and have a lovely crisp on the outside with a slightly gooey, squashy centre - absolutely irresistable.

The plan was to make 30 of these, to eat a couple for dessert, and spend the rest of the week eating a few a day so I could tell you how long they'll last in an airtight box. Sadly, they turn out to be rather moreish, and I discover that as of this morning Dr Weasel and I have both been fishing surreptitiously in the box when we thought the other person wasn't looking. There are only ten left. I think I need to get the exercise ball out before I start to resemble it.

To make about thirty cookies, you'll need:

110g ground almonds
110g plain flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
150g golden marzipan
225g salted butter
225g caster sugar
1 egg white
½ teaspoon almond extract
80g dried sour cherries

Mix the ground almonds, flour and baking powder in a large bowl, and chop the marzipan into tiny cubes (about half a centimetre on each side). Mix the marzipan with the dry ingredients carefully, so each little cube is coated and separate, and set the bowl aside.

In another bowl, cream the softened butter and sugar together with an electric whisk in another bowl. Add the egg white and almond extract and keep at it with the whisk until the mixture is pale and fluffy. Use a wooden spoon to stir the flour and marzipan mixture into the butter mixture with the cherries.

At first the mixture will look as if it won't form a dough, but if you keep at it you'll find it will eventually come together smoothly (in part thanks to the oils in the marzipan and ground almonds). Bring the dough together into a ball with your hands and put it in a freezer bag, seal and leave in the fridge overnight.

When you are ready to bake the cookies, preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Take the dough out of the fridge and make neat balls of about an inch in diameter between your palms, ensuring that every ball has at least a couple of cherries in it. Arrange the balls on grease-proof paper on baking sheets with a gap of 2 inches between each one, and bake for about 25-30 minutes until the cookies are turning golden (see photograph). Remove from the oven and leave to cool on the baking sheets until the cookies start to firm (about five minutes). Use a spatula to move them onto racks to finish cooling.

Gingerbread

Massive apologies for the gap in posting. Something dreadful happened: Dr W bought me a copy of Spore, and my week subsequently vanished. It wasn't just the week that disappeared - with it went my ability to sleep or get anything besides evolving, building cities, murdering pirates, searching for the Grox and colonising several star systems done. Still - I'm back now, and the really good news is that next week I will be blogging from Montreal, where I'll eating at Toque! (apparently one of Canada's best restaurants), Au Pied de Cochon (foie gras, duck, pigs' feet, poutine), Schwartz's Charcuterie Hebraique and plenty of other interesting spots, as well as hunting down some markets and delis. Spore is not coming with me to Montreal, so I'm all yours. This time, I've booked a suite hotel, specifically because it came with a kitchen. How many times have you been on holiday and found yourself antsy because you don't have a fridge or oven to keep or cook that amazing and fascinating thing you found someone selling?

Anyway. Onto the gingerbread. This is a southern English gingerbread, not the northern parkin, which usually includes oatmeal along with the treacle. This gingerbread is a lovely dense, moist, dark cake, which will keep perfectly for more than a week if you wrap it tightly in greaseproof paper and tinfoil. Don't eat this on the day that you make it - wrap it up and put it to one side for a day, and your gingerbread will become even moister and stickier overnight.

The pieces of crystallised ginger will sink in the tin, but this actually creates a very pretty jewel-like layer of ginger at the bottom of the gingerbread loaf. Turn it upside-down to serve so the jewelled surface is on top. To make gingerbread to fill a 1l loaf tin, you'll need:

110g golden syrup
110g treacle
110g soft brown sugar
280ml milk
230g self-raising flour
1 ½ teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground mixed spice
110g salted butter
1 egg
150g crystallised ginger in syrup, drained and chopped

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F).

Grease the bowl of your weighing scales, and measure out the treacle and syrup. Pour them into a saucepan (patting yourself on the back for having had the foresight to grease the bowl) and warm gently, until the mixture reaches body heat. In another pan, dissolve the sugar in the milk over a low heat and set aside.

Sieve the flour, spices and bicarb together, and rub the butter into the mixture, as if you were making pastry, until you have a fine mixture resembling breadcrumbs. Add the ginger pieces and mix thoroughly. Use a balloon whisk to beat the milk and sugar mixture, then the treacle and syrup mixture, into the flour. Finally, beat the egg into the gingerbread batter with your whisk.

Pour the mixture into a greased and lined loaf tin, and bake for 1-1¼ hours, until a toothpick inserted into the middle of the gingerbread comes out clean. Cool in the tin, turn out and wrap tightly for 24 hours before eating.

Chocolate orange fairy cakes

I eat precisely one Terry's Chocolate Orange every year, at Christmas. Here, for non-festive times of year, is the same thing in cake form.

There will be no post here on Monday; it's a Bank Holiday, and I shall be spending the day on a boat.

To make 16 little cakes, you'll need:

Cake
100g soft butter
100g caster sugar
2 eggs
100g self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
Grated zest of 1 oranges

Icing
75g dark chocolate (I used Hotel Chocolat's amazing 100% cocoa solids bar from the Purist range)
50g butter
75ml double cream
Grated zest of 1 orange

Preheat the oven to 200° C. Beat all the cake ingredients together with an electric whisk until the mixture is pale, light and fluffy. Divide it between 16 paper cake cases and bake for 20-25 minutes until the cakes are pale gold in colour, and a toothpick inserted into the centre of one comes out clean. Set the cakes to cool on a rack while you make the icing.

Melt the butter and chocolate together in a bowl over some boiling water. Stir in the orange zest and a tablespoon of the cold cream, and begin to beat with the electric whisk on medium. Pour in the cream in a thin stream as you beat, and when all the cream is incorporated, continue to beat air into the chocolate until the mixture is pale, spreadable and light.

Spread the icing over the cooled cakes with a knife (or, if you don't hate washing up, pipe it on). These cakes keep well in an airtight container for a few days.

Pouding chomeur - maple syrup sponge pudding

The chocolate puddle pudding I wrote about a few weeks ago went down so well that I felt duty-bound to make another self-saucing dessert for you to try at home. Pouding chomeur (French for poor man's pudding) is a French Canadian dish, dating from an era when poor men could afford maple syrup. Maple syrup has been pretty pricey stuff for as long as I remember, and I suspect that this pudding was named when dinosaurs still roamed the Latin Quarter of Montreal.

You'll be making an easy sponge, and pouring a maple syrup and cream sauce over it before putting it in the oven. The liquid magically swaps places with the sponge while the pudding is cooking, and you'll end up with a lovely moist cake layer on top of a thick, syrupy, mellow and gloriously sweet sauce.

A warning - this is, by design, a very sweet dessert. I recommend cutting through the sweetness by sloshing cream over the warm cake before you eat it, or by having a glass of cold milk by your plate.

To make an amazingly sweet cake from the time of the dinosaurs, you'll need:

Sauce
375 ml maple syrup (I used Grade A syrup, but Grade B will be great here too)
250 ml double cream
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
Pinch of salt

Cake
170 g caster sugar
90 g butter
225 g self-raising flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
180 ml milk
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
¼ nutmeg, grated
Zest of 1 lemon

Preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F).

Bring the syrup, cream, vinegar and salt to the boil in a saucepan and immediately remove from the heat. Set aside.

Cream together the butter and sugar with an electric whisk in a large mixing bowl, until the mixture is pale and soft. Add the egg, vanilla extract, lemon zest and nutmeg to the bowl and beat in well with the whisk. Sieve the flour and baking powder in another bowl. Continue to whisk the creamed butter mixture on a medium to high speed, adding the milk and flour a tablespoon at a time until all the milk and flour are used up and the sponge mixture is light and fluffy.

Use a spatula to spread the sponge mixture in the bottom of a 20 cm square cake tin. Pour the sauce gently over the top. Don't worry if it appears to disturb the sponge mixture - magic will happen as soon as you shut the oven door.

Put the cake tin on a middle shelf of the oven and bake for 45-50 minutes (it may take ten minutes or so longer - test the cake with a toothpick in the centre; if it comes out clean, the cake is done). Serve warm with an insulin drip.

Chocolate puddle pudding

This is a rich chocolate pudding, which makes its own sauce when cooked and rises like a chocolate sponge island in a syrupy chocolate sea. Your mother probably made chocolate puddle pudding. I've been asking around, and everybody's mother seems to have had a similar recipe - and what sensible mothers they were, because this is rich and delicious, malevolently chocolatey and so quick and easy that my cats could make it (given opposable thumbs, the ability to read recipes and access to some weighing scales, an oven, bowls and...you get the idea). To serve six, you'll need:

6 tablespoons cocoa powder
150 g self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
200 g vanilla sugar (or 200g caster sugar and a few drops vanilla essence)
30 g salted butter
75 g dark chocolate (use something with a high proportion of cocoa solids)
150 ml milk
150 g soft brown sugar
500 ml hot water

Preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F).

Measure the flour and vanilla sugar into a large mixing bowl with two tablespoons of the cocoa powder and the baking powder. Melt the butter and chocolate together, and when melted, add them to the bowl with the milk. Stir with a wooden spoon until everything is well blended, and spread the mixture (which should be a thick paste) into the bottom of a baking dish. (I used a 20x30 cm dish.)

Mix the soft brown sugar with the remaining four tablespoons of cocoa, and sprinkle them over the top of the sponge mixture. Pour over the hot water (this should be hot from the kettle but not boiling) and put in the oven for 45 minutes. The sponge pudding will rise through the puddle of chocolate sauce. Serve with vanilla ice cream or a big dollop of cream.

Currant cakes

I love currants. The little dried rabbit-dropping things, I mean, not the tart currants that we grow in England, which are all very well in Cumberland sauce and so on, but lack the sweet seductiveness that you really need for an excellent cake. The currants I am talking about are Zante currants, which are tiny, tiny dried grapes grown absurdly sweet in the Greek sunshine. They're the fruit you'll find in Eccles cakes, and they have a wonderfully sweet and mildly tangy flavour, quite different from other dried vine fruits.

Horrifyingly, especially if you share my tidy British habit of compartmentalising foods, I discovered when living in France that on mainland Europe nobody differentiates between currants, sultanas and raisins. If it's small, dark and wrinkly, it's called a raisin, so if you are in France and want some currants, you're going to have to do a bit of light mime in the grocer if you want to buy proper, tiny Zante currants rather than horrible giant American golden raisins, which are processed with sulphur and taste rubbish. The golden raisin sometimes masquerades as a sultana in the UK too - beware.

I've iced these currant cakes with a really easy buttercream, which is deliciously mellow with the tartness of the dried fruit. To make about 18 cakes, you'll need:

Cakes
100g softened butter
100g caster sugar
100g self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 medium eggs
50g currants

Buttercream
175g softened butter
350g icing sugar
2 tablespoons warm water

Preheat the oven to 200° C (400° F). Lay 18 little paper cake cases in bun tins, and beat all the cake ingredients together in a mixing bowl with an electric whisk for two to three minutes, until the cake mixture is pale, smooth and fluffy. Divide the mixture between the cases (they should each be about half-full).

Bake in the hot oven for between 15 and 20 minutes. Devotees of this blog should be familiar with the Dr Weasel Aural Method of cake testing - when your little cakes come out of the oven, bring an ear close to them and listen carefully. If the cake is making tiny prickling noises, it is not ready: return it to the oven for a couple of minutes. A finished cake is silent. As Emily points out in the comments, a finished cake may not be *entirely* silent. Minimal prickling noises are allowed - do not allow your cakes to carbonise.

Put the cakes in their paper cases on a wire rack to cool. While they are cooling, make the buttercream icing by using your electric whisk to beat the butter, water and icing sugar together until it too is pale, smooth and fluffy. Spread the icing on the cakes when they are cold, and decorate any way you like.

Coconut ice

This is a recipe that's ideal for child-centric bake sales - school fêtes, church fairs, that sort of thing. Kids love making sweeties, and coconut ice is one of the few sweets that doesn't require any cooking, so it's a safe recipe for little hands to get stuck into.

If you're making this with children, it's worth buying pink food colouring rather than just using a teeny amount of red. Children let loose on red colouring can easily produce coconut ice that looks like the St Valentine's Day Massacre, so spend 40p on the pink stuff for a reliably Barbie-pink finish.

I have found myself a little queasy around condensed milk since John Prescott announced his uncanny ability to "sup a whole tin of Carnation...just for the taste" (and then spew it forth again). Coconut ice a very good way to rehabilitate the stuff. The amount this recipe produces will help you erase any such nasty images from your mind via the diabetic coma you'll fall into if you eat all of it.

To make just over a kilogram of coconut ice, you'll need:

400g dessicated coconut
400g icing sugar
1 tin (397g) condensed milk
½ teaspoon pink food colouring

In a large bowl, stir the dessicated coconut, icing sugar and condensed milk together until you have a stiff, sticky mixture. Remove half the coconut ice to a clean bowl and add the food colouring, then stir again until the colour is blended in smoothly. (Stirring this is hard work because the mixture is rather stiff, so children will need supervision.)

Line a small rectangular dish with cling film, making sure there is plenty overhanging at the sides. (Later, you will fold these overhanging bits over to cover the coconut ice.) Grease the cling film with a few drops of vegetable oil. Take the white portion of coconut ice and pack it firmly into the lined dish, making sure you produce an even layer. Pack the pink portion into a neat layer on top of the white layer. They will stick together firmly, thanks to the amazing adhesive qualities of sugar and condensed milk. Fold the cling film over the top and refrigerate the coconut ice overnight.

When the coconut ice is nice and firm from the fridge, turn it out of the dish, using the cling film to help, and peel the film away. Chop into little squares (a serrated knife is useful here), dust with icing sugar and pack in greaseproof paper for the school fête.

Chocolate fondue

Thanks for all the kind emails - I'm still recovering from the flu and am decidedly wobbly, but a whole lot better than I was at the start of the week. Just as well, because next week I'll be in Helsinki, on the lookout for reindeer, vendace roe, rye bread and soused herrings.

Cooking's been beyond me since my encounter with this horrible germ, and my tastebuds are still not giving any kind of sensible feedback to my brain - most things are still either tasteless or, oddly, extremely bitter. Happily, there's one foodstuff that even the flu can't ruin for me: chocolate. So it's out with the new fondue set.

If you're making your own chocolate fondue, try dipping cantucci, those hard little Italian biscuits; dried pear, marshmallows and fresh, ripe bananas are also great. I'm not a huge fan of strawberries in any chocolatey context; they're too acid, especially out of season, to work well with chocolate. I'm aware that I'm in a minority here though - if you like strawberries dunked in chocolate, dip away.

To serve four, you'll need:

250 g good quality dark chocolate
100 ml double cream
2 tablespoons Amaretto
Fruits, biscuits, fresh almonds etc. to dip

Hopelessly easy, this. Put your chocolate in a sealed bag and wallop the hell out of it with the end of a rolling pin, until it's reduced to little bits. Stir the chocolate bits into the cream in your fondue pot, and melt together with the cream over a low heat on the hob, stirring all the time. Transfer to a low flame on the fondue stand and stir in the Amaretto. Proceed to fight over who gets the pink marshmallows.

Sticky toffee pudding

Way back in the early 1980s, my mother used to get a magazine (now sadly defunct) called A La Carte. It was some serious aspirational 1980s stuff - all glossy pages, gorgeous photos and recipes full of exotic (for the 80s) things like sun-dried tomatoes. Long after the rest of her collection had vanished, one issue of the magazine stayed downstairs on the cookery book shelves. It was Easter, so there was a fluffy rabbit frolicking in salad leaves on the front, and a bold headline saying 'Lettuce play'. Page upon page of salad with more bunny porn followed - along with a recipe for something called an Ooey, Gooey Sticky Toffee Pudding - the sole reason for preserving this issue of the magazine for thirty years.

These were the dark days of the Falklands and the miners' strike. Nobody else in Bedfordshire seemed very interested in food. At school and at my friend's houses, pudding was always instant Angel Delight, a scoop of fatty, pink ice-cream or jelly. At home, it was different - where the other children were eating bowls of instant custard with a banana chopped into them, my lovely Mum was making sticky toffee pudding, and we had the most inventive salads in town.

To make sticky toffee pudding for six, you'll need:

Pudding
150g stoned dates
250ml hot water from the kettle
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
60g softened unsalted butter
60g caster sugar
2 large eggs
150g self-raising flour

Sauce
200g butter
400g soft brown sugar
1 vanilla pod (or a few drops of vanilla essence)
250ml double cream

Heat the oven to 180°C (370°F).

Chop the stoned dates finely with a small sharp knife and put in a bowl. Sprinkle over the bicarbonate of soda and pour over the hot water, stirring well. Set aside for ten minutes while you prepare the rest of the cake mixture.

Cream the butter and sugar together, then beat the eggs into the mixture. Gradually stir in the sifted flour, then fold in the date mixture. Pour the batter, which will be quite loose, into a greased, 20 cm square cake tin, and bake for 35-40 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean. The cake will have risen, but not dramatically - this is quite a dense pudding.

Make the sauce while the cake is baking. Melt the sugar and butter together with the vanilla pod and cook over a medium heat, stirring, for five minutes. Stir in the double cream and bring to a low simmer for another five minutes.

Make holes in the top of the cake with your skewer and pour over half of the sauce. Serve immediately with extra sauce to pour over at the table, and a jug of cold double cream. (Some like this dish with ice cream, but I like cream best.)

Easy chocolate truffles

It's heartening to realise that the richest, velvety-est, most sinful chocolate truffles you can imagine are very easy indeed to make. There's no faffing around with tempering or measuring fat/solid ratios - just some melting and chilling.

These dense little balls of silky paradise are full of things that make the animal bits of your brain go tick. The chocolate itself, packed with theobromine, stimulates the release of feel-good endorphins. The creamy, cocoa rush that emerges when they melt fatly on your tongue makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. If the way to someone's heart really is through the stomach, these are the digestive equivalent of a scalpel: precise and potentially deadly.

You'll need to keep these in the fridge and eat within about three days of making them for maximum freshness. If, unaccountably, you can't manage to get through this volume of chocolate in half a week, these truffles freeze very well.

To make 50 truffles (depending on how many you find yourself eating as you roll them) you'll need:

300g good quality, dark chocolate
300ml double cream plus 2 tablespoons
50g salted butter
Cocoa to roll

Start by preparing the chocolate by blitzing it in the food processor until it resembles very delicious-smelling breadcrumbs (see the picture for the sort of texture you're aiming for). If you don't have access to a food processor, you can grate it with the coarse side of your grater - this is laborious, but works well. Remove the chocolate to a large mixing bowl.

Using a thick-bottomed pan, bring 300ml of thick cream and the butter slowly to simmering point. I like to use salted butter in a ganache; the small amount of salt is undetectable in the finished product, but it lifts the flavour of the chocolate. Stir the hot cream mixture well and transfer it to a jug.

To make the ganache that will form your truffles, pour the hot cream and butter into the bowl full of chocolate in a thin stream, stirring all the time. The chocolate will melt and combine with the cream, and you'll end up with a very runny, silky, dark brown mixture. Finish by stirring two tablespoons of cold cream into the mixture (this helps to prevent the mixture from seizing, or becoming granular) until the ganache is evenly coloured. Cover the bowl and place in the refrigerator to firm the ganache up.

At this point, you have a choice. You can take the ganache out of the fridge and use an electric whisk to beat it to soft peaks about an hour into the chilling time. Be careful not to overbeat to avoid the dreaded seizing. This will result in soft, airy, fluffy truffles, and will also add volume to your mixture so you'll have more truffles at the end. (You'll find that many shop-bought truffles are the beaten kind - you need much less chocolate per truffle, so it works out cheaper for the manufacturer.) I much prefer my truffles dark, dense and silky, so I prefer to leave the ganache without beating.

If you are not whisking the ganache, leave it in the fridge for at least four hours or overnight. You'll find you now have a nice stiff mixture. If you want to add flavourings or bits of nut, citrus zest, crystallised ginger or other spices, now is the time to do it, using the back of a fork to mush any well-chopped additions into the ganache. (Again, I like my truffles dark, dense and above all chocolatey, so I don't adulterate them.)

Lay out petits fours cases and put a couple of heaped tablespoons of cocoa on a plate. Use clean hands to mould teaspoons of the ganache into balls, then roll them in the cocoa - this stops them from sticking and makes them look tidy. Place each one in a little case. Those feeling daring can roll their truffles in crushed nuts, shredded coconut or demerara sugar instead of cocoa. Presto - you're finished. I think these are at their absolute best with a hot cup of freshly brewed coffee.