Cherry and chocolate cake with almond icing

I didn't eat chocolate until I was about fifteen years old. If I'd ever had to play that irritating "tell us your name and an interesting fact about yourself" game at that age, that would have been my interesting fact, largely because it always met with such sheer astonishment. People, especially my peers and teachers, were aghast. However, when considered on the spectrum of other things I didn't eat, it perhaps wasn't that strange, considering I also refused to consume most basic foodstuffs. I remember going on a French exchange at the age of about fourteen; the family wrote to me before I visited, asking if I had any dietary requirements. I wrote back, in French, a long list of things I wouldn't eat, including "pâtes et riz": pasta and rice. I can just picture the poor family's reaction as they opened this missive. It was fortunate that I didn't also say "fromage et boeuf", or they may have refused me entry to France altogether. That said, maybe that would have been a blessing: my exchange partner was an utterly bizarre human being, with eyebrows too enormous to be fully comprehensible, and a lingering body odour. 

I didn't eat sweets, either. I remember I was once handed a sweet at a friend's birthday party when I was quite young. The other kids shrieked in delight and rapidly consumed their sugary lozenges. I contemplated mine for several minutes, feeling its smooth oblong contours and gazing curiously at the tiny bubbles of air trapped in the amber-like exterior. I didn't know what to do with it; giving it away would clearly reveal my awful secret dislike of sweets and no doubt cause endless social stigma for years to come. I would be friendless. I would be shunned by the sweet-eating cool kids, relegated to a lonely corner of the playground and pelted with sweet wrappers every break time. Yet I couldn't bring myself to ingest this alien, lurid, fructose-laden pellet of woe. Instead, when I was sure no one was looking, I scuffed a hole in the gravel driveway outside my friend's house with my shoe, and buried the sweetie under the pebbles with the same furtive glances and guilty conscience as if I were burying a freshly murdered corpse (I imagine).

I have absolutely no idea what finally caused me to try chocolate, nor do I remember my reaction upon first tasting it. Did I find it strange? Was it something I had to be weaned onto before addiction struck, like cigarettes? (Mother, if you're reading this, I am only speculating - tobacco has never passed my lips). Or was I instantly in love? I wish I could remember. Was it a good quality bar of the finest dark stuff that first got me hooked on cocoa? Or was it something in foil from a box of Celebrations? Probably the latter. I do remember, though, that quite soon after I found chocolate, I found Twirl bars. I loved the way the outer hard casing gave way to that irresistibly flaky, melt-in-the-mouth, crumbly chocolate centre. These were a favourite of mine for a while; I think it was probably a good couple of years or so before I enjoyed real dark chocolate. Though I still have a soft spot for the commercial, sugar-heavy variety. Sometimes nothing hits the spot quite like a square of Cadburys fruit and nut.

That said, I am still not what you'd call a chocoholic. My friends know this; they are constantly bemoaning the fact that a box of Ferrero Rocher that I received for my birthday seven months ago still sits, over half full, in my bedroom (and the only reason it isn't more full is because they help themselves to it every time they visit, convinced they're doing me a favour). It's not that I don't really like chocolate; I just like it in very small doses. I love Ferrero Rocher, but I'm just pretty good with willpower. Very rarely will I get a sudden craving for a big bar of chocolate; if I do, a couple of mouthfuls will normally sate said craving, especially if it's dark chocolate, which I find so flavoursome and intense I can only stomach a couple of bites. It's a different story for those Lindor truffles or the easter bunnies in gold wrapping, though...I could easily polish off a whole one if I didn't have aforementioned willpower of steel (you need it, to write a food blog).

Chocolate just isn't something I go completely mad for. I would never order a chocolate-based dessert in a restaurant, and I rarely bake them either. I much prefer fruit-based desserts, largely because they're often more exciting and inventive, and because I love fruit more than I love chocolate. Fruity desserts possess that necessary tartness required to balance out creaminess or sugar; chocolatey desserts all too often err on the side of sickliness. Give me a ripe mango or pear over a box of Lindor any day. Weird, but true. I crave chocolate maybe once a month, and I can't eat it without a cup of tea or coffee - I hate the way it coats your mouth; you need hot liquid to dissolve it from between your teeth or your mouth just feels horrible. This is good, because it means I'm unlikely to eat chocolate on a whim; I have to really sit down and take my time over it, alternating sips of steaming tea with little nibbles of sugary goodness. It takes me, on average, over a week to eat a normal, small bar of Dairy Milk, the kind most people would wolf down without a second thought mid-afternoon. People find this absurd and infuriating, but that's just me.

Fruit is better than chocolate in my opinion. However, when you combine the two, you have something incredibly special, far more than the sum of its parts. Many fruits pair extremely well with chocolate. Oranges, pears, figs (you can buy dried figs coated in chocolate in posh delis all over Italy) bananas and strawberries all go exceedingly well, but most other fruits will work too, except maybe apple or melon. Just think of those awful ubiquitous chocolate fountains you get at parties; pretty much any fruit tastes good dipped in those (though it won't when I tell you that those things are at least 30% oil, in order to get the chocolate to flow properly, and very likely to breed horrible bacteria because of their consistently warm temperatures).

Another classic combination is chocolate and cherries. This works well not just from a flavour point of view; the glossy purple-red skin of a cherry looks beautiful paired with a muted canvas of dark, silky chocolate. The slight tang and sweetness of good cherries is just what you need to lift the deep richness of good chocolate. I've been toying with the idea of a cherry and chocolate mousse for a while, especially because the cherry season is in full swing and there are some lovely (and extraordinarily cheap) specimens around at the moment. However, mousse is another thing I'm not hugely fond of; I generally like my desserts to have a bit more texture. Basically, I love them to be stodgy and satisfying, like a good crumble (incidentally, cherry and chocolate crumble is something I am going to have to try). Mousse just doesn't sate me in a way something packed with flour, butter and sugar will.

I say that, but this cake doesn't actually contain any butter. In fact, apart from the fairly small quantity of good quality dark chocolate it contains, it is fat free. I debated whether to tell you that, because it makes it sound like it will be dry and horrible. In fact, it's entirely the opposite. Something magical happens when you put the very loose mixture, thickened using beaten egg whites, into the oven. The outside hardens to a flaky crisp while the inside stays molten and gooey, rather like a chocolate fondant. When eaten warm, it basically tastes like a chocolate fondant, but with the immensely pleasurable squash of a tart, juicy cherry every couple of mouthfuls. I've made this before with brandy-soaked prunes, but the cherry version is even better, because of the juiciness and the slight sourness. I too often find cherries rather disappointing; they don't seem to have a real flavour, just a generic burst of tart juice that I can take or leave, unlike the clear fragrance of a strawberry or blackcurrant. However, they take to heat very well, so are perfect for tucking into the chocolate-rich batter of this cake, where they give just the right subtle fruitness to balance it without overpowering and hogging the limelight.

This is an incredibly easy cake; you add beaten egg whites and flour to a liquid mixture of molten chocolate, boiling water, sugar and cocoa powder. The result is an extremely runny batter, more like a crepe mixture, that looks like it will never work as you pour it into the tin and drop pitted cherries into it, watching them sink into the chocolatey lake like quicksand swallowing a hapless wanderer. Yet under an hour later, you remove a perfectly formed cake from the oven, perfuming your kitchen with that irresistible aroma of baked cocoa. I decided to adorn it with nothing more than a drizzle of almond-flavoured icing: just icing sugar, almond essence, and a drop of water. It hardens to a satisfying crunch, the pronounced, bakewell-like almond flavour marrying incredibly well with the rich chocolate and juicy cherries. The cake in itself isn't too sweet, so the icing sets it off nicely, and the contrast in textures between the crispy exterior of the cake with its crunchy icing and its warm, oozing interior is sublime.

I love this cake. I love it even more because it's basically guilt-free, but tastes like something that is laden with butter and sugar. It really is just as good as a melting chocolate fondant, but accompanied by none of the self-loathing. The inside stays almost liquid; you need a spoon rather than a fork to eat it which, when chocolate is concerned, can only be a good thing. Served still warm from the oven, I can think of few better things to enjoy for dessert or just with a cup of tea. The scarlet cherries studded throughout the dark, melting cake batter lift it from delicious to incredible; I can't think of a better combination. Because I so rarely eat chocolatey desserts, I often forget just how wonderful they can be, and how fine a thing chocolate actually is. This reminded me.

I might have to go and eat one of those Ferrero Rocher now...

Cherry and chocolate cake with almond icing (makes one 20cm cake):

• 300g cherries, pitted, plus extra for serving
• 75g good quality dark cooking chocolate, broken into small pieces
• 25g cocoa powder
• 150g muscovado sugar
• 150ml boiling water
• 25g caster sugar
• 4 egg whites
• 75g plain flour
• 5 tbsp icing sugar
• 1/2 tsp almond essence
• Water

Pre-heat the oven to 190C. Grease and line a 20cm springform cake tin. Mix the boiling water, cocoa, chocolate and muscovado sugar in a mixing bowl, stirring until thoroughly melted.

Whisk the egg whites until stiff and you can turn the bowl upside down without them moving. Whisk in the sugar until the mixture has the consistency of shaving foam.

Sift the flour into the chocolate mixture and fold in with a spoon until incorporated. Add a spoonful of the egg white mixture to the chocolate and fold it in to loosen it, then add the rest of the chocolate to the egg whites. Fold in gently, being careful not to knock all the air out of the whites, until just incorporated.

Pour into the prepared tin and drop the cherries over the surface of the batter. Place in the oven and bake for 35 minutes until just firm.

For the icing, mix the icing sugar, almond essence, and a little water to achieve a fairly thick paste, but one that you can still drizzle over the top of the cake. Serve with extra fresh cherries.

Sage-crusted veal with summer vegetables

Sage is a herb I rarely use. I think, like most English people, I associate it simply with the stuffing for the Christmas turkey, or other heavy, pork-laden winter fare. When I think of cooking with herbs, I think of gorgeous, vibrant bunches of coriander, with their bright, yellow-green leaves the exact colour of ripe limes. I think of feathery dill, in large quivering bunches, with its slender leaves like little jade needles. I think of fresh mint, possibly my favourite aroma in the world, reminiscent of lemons in its freshness. I once stalked a small boy halfway across the suburbs of Marrakech because he was carrying the biggest bunch of mint I've ever seen in my life, and it was perfuming the surrounding air with its zesty scent. I think of the sharp, astringent, aniseedy snap of fresh basil or the beautiful delicacy of a sprig of thyme, barely wider than one of my own hairs, with its tiny pointed leaves, those ready for picking sporting a delightful purple blush where they meet the stem. I had never noticed this until a chef I once worked for pointed it out to me, instructing me to harvest only the leaves with a deep, flushed underside for whatever dish he was cooking at the time. But rarely do I think of the braille-like pebbly texture of sage leaves, the muted jade green of a Regency drawing room, with their deeply aromatic and somehow comforting scent; designed, it seems, to be paired with other comfort foods to bring cheer in the darkest winter.

Perhaps this is unfair, though, and a gross underestimation of the potential of poor old overlooked sage (or even downright maligned - Elizabeth David dismissed it as having a "musty, dried blood scent" that "deadens" food). I was going to say there must be a reason why supermarkets sell this herb all year round, not just at Christmas, but then I realised that supermarkets sell most things all year round, and that is no indication of their quality - just think of hideous, crunchy, sour strawberries in November, or bitter Peruvian asparagus even when the tender English crop is in full swing. However, there is definitely a case to be made for bringing sage out of the winter period it is often consigned to. Sadly, it seems that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall got there first in the fight to rehabilitate this lovely herb with his article in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago, but hopefully this is another recipe that will help to support his case.

There has been a gorgeous piece of veal sitting in my freezer for a couple of months now, from the Real Food Festival. While the burgers and sausages have been barbecued, and the rump steak served as veal saltimbocca, the little silverside roasting joint has languished, saved for a special occasion that kept failing to arise. Finally, the stars aligned to produce the perfect opportunity for this diminutive joint: it was a Sunday, the weather was beautiful but not too hot, my boyfriend and I had nowhere important to be, and we both wanted a good roast dinner. Despite the bizarre weather of late, it is still July, and therefore a full roast with all the heavy trimmings (Yorkshire puddings, thick dark gravy, the spiky caramelised edges of golden root vegetables) doesn't seem appropriate. Instead, I came up with this much lighter variation on a roast dinner; satisfying, flavoursome, but still full of summer.

I wanted to serve the meat fairly plain, because it seemed too lovely to mess around with. One of my favourite ways to serve simple, fast-cooking joints of meat like fillet or rack of lamb is to roll them in a crust of herbs, nuts or spices (or all three). That way the beautiful interior of the meat still captures attention, but it both looks nicer and has a bit of textural contrast to accentuate it. I decided to use sage for the veal crust, because it pairs so well with veal (as in the classic veal saltimbocca, where veal steaks are wrapped in Parma ham and sage leaves). The crust is a variation on Italian gremolata, a mixture of very finely chopped parsley, lemon zest and garlic. It's best known for being sprinkled over osso bucco, a dish of braised veal shin on the bone usually served with saffron risotto. The mixture of these zesty, tangy ingredients perfectly balances the unctuous richness of braised meat and marrow. I used sage instead of parsley, and added a few breadcrumbs to the mixture as well to help it crisp up in the oven.

After searing the veal in a very hot pan (I relish that sizzling noise), I brushed it with a little mustard and rolled it in the sage, lemon and garlic mix. It then went in the oven on top of a bed of mushrooms and sliced leeks. I completely guessed the timing for the meat, as I couldn't find any reliable guidelines as to roasting times for a joint this small, but it worked perfectly (to my immense delight, especially after the tragedy that was my recent beef topside, planned to be oozing blood and instead dry and mealy throughout, probably due to my overactive oven). I kept the accompaniments as simple as possible: boiled and steamed summer vegetables (carrots, broccoli, peas and broad beans), and tiny baby new potatoes roasted in their skins until crackly and burnished gold. Instead of gravy, I poured a glass of rosé into the hot roasting tin with the mushrooms and leeks; it formed a dark, flavoursome jus with the earthiness of mushrooms and a slight sweetness from the wine (which, incidentally, was horrible wine to drink, more akin to an energy drink than anything vinified, but lovely for cooking with).

The colours of this dish are perfect for summer: the vegetables are wonderfully vibrant against the muted pastel pink and green of the crusted veal. It is beautifully tender (and apparently even better the next day, thinly sliced in a bagel with mustard and rocket, as my boyfriend informs me), the fat rendered into crispness and the sage, lemon and garlic accentuating the rich, slightly bloody meat. Add to that a crunchy canvas of summer vegetables and a trickle of light gravy, and you have the perfect meal for a warm summer evening with a glass of chilled white wine. Possibly the best part is the mushroom and leek mixture I roasted the veal on; the mushrooms absorb all the meat juices as well as the wine from the gravy, meaning they are beautifully caramelised but also saturated with flavoursome juice. The sage really brings the dish together, infusing its subtle perfume throughout the meat and vegetables. 

It really does deserve its year-round place on the supermarket shelf after all.

Sage-crusted veal with summer vegetables (serves 2, with leftovers):

• 10 baby new potatoes
• Salt and pepper
• Dried herbs, for the potatoes
• 500g silverside joint of veal
• 10g sage leaves
• 3 cloves garlic
• Zest of a lemon
• A slice of bread
• Olive oil
• 2 tsp mustard
• A punnet of mushrooms
• 2 leeks, sliced
• Half a head of broccoli, cut into florets
• 1 carrot, finely diced
• 500g broad beans, podded
• A couple of handfuls frozen peas
• A knob of butter
• A glass of rosé wine

Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Toss the potatoes in a little olive oil, salt and pepper and your choice of dried herbs. Place in a small roasting tray and place in the oven. They will take about 30-40 minutes to cook, but it does no harm to leave them in for longer while the veal roasts.

Place the sage, garlic, lemon and bread in a blender and pulse until finely chopped. Spread out on a plate.

Heat a little olive oil in a heavy-based ovenproof pan until almost smoking, then place the veal in the pan. Sear on all sides until golden brown, then brush with mustard and roll in the sage mixture to coat thoroughly.

Place the mushrooms and leeks in the pan then place the veal on top. Put in the oven and roast for about 25 minutes, for medium-rare meat. Remove the meat from the oven, place on a carving board and cover with foil. Rest for 10-15 minutes. Keep the mushrooms and leeks in the oven.

While the meat is resting, boil the peas and broad beans, and if you have a steamer, steam the broccoli and carrots over the top. If not, just boil everything together (do the carrots and broccoli first, as they take longer). Toss the cooked vegetables with the butter and some salt and pepper.

When ready to serve, place the vegetables and cooked potatoes on a plate, slice the veal thinly and arrange over the top. Pour the wine into the mushroom and leek pan; it should hiss and bubble. Stir the pan to deglaze, and serve this over the top of the meat and vegetables.

Coconut French toast with mango and blueberries

I can't get enough of these honey mangoes. The day they stop appearing in the Indian grocers is going to be a sorrowful occasion. I might hold a small mango funeral and make a mango graveyard with the stones from my last box of mangoes, wearing yellow instead of black and crooning a mournful ode to the king of fruits. Except I won't actually do that, because that would be bordering on creepy and obsessive. Until that tragic day arrives, however, I'm compulsively buying boxes of mangoes and attempting to incorporate them into every meal. I'm getting weird looks from people at the gym and the swimming pool: the mango shop is en route, so I usually arrive at the sports centre with a bottle of water and iPod in one hand, and three large boxes proclaiming themselves 'FRUITY FRESH' in the other which I then stow away secretively in a locker, with a final farewell caress, lest some common pleb get their hands on my glorious edible treasure. It's testament to how beautiful these fruits are that when I open the locker an hour later, it no longer smells of people's sweaty gym gear, but instead is fragrant with the heady perfume of golden mango flesh.

Sometimes when I am eating these mangoes, golden juice dribbling unattractively down my chin and often my forearm, I cannot quite believe that something that tastes so damn good can actually be good for you. I mean, I love fruit of all kinds, but these mangoes are almost sinfully delicious. Delicious in a kind of way that you'd normally only associate with things that clog your arteries. Delicious in a way that makes you want to suck every last drop of juice from the stone in a greedy and rather impolite fashion. Delicious in a way that means you can't help nibbling a few pieces as you slice them up for your boyfriend's breakfast, and consequently he gives you a rather intent look for a couple of seconds as he enters the kitchen before declaring accusingly, "I see evidence!" You look in the mirror, and there it is. An orange moustache. As unambiguous as fingerprints on a murder weapon. Caught in the act of mango ingestion.

After the success of my mango, coconut and cardamom cheesecake, I wanted to recreate something similar in breakfast form. A honey mango is a brilliant breakfast food: it's soft and ripe enough not to be too texturally demanding first thing in the morning, but it's also juicy and tangy enough to wake up your tastebuds, and sweet enough to feel like a real indulgence. Plus that gorgeous marigold colour makes you feel like you're getting sunshine in the morning even if it's grey and drizzly outside (which, this being England, is rather likely). Just chopping up these beautiful fruits makes the morning a little bit better. Especially because of the cook's perk that is the mango stone. The flesh that clings to its contours is impossible to extract with a knife; it has to be extracted by one's teeth, sucked clean like a carcass in a rapturous and greedy fashion. I think that when I cook with these mangoes, only about 60% of each one makes it into the finished dish. The rest ends up in my stomach. It makes sense; it would be a waste to throw the fleshy stone into the bin, with so much deliciousness surrounding it, so I'm actually being eco-friendly rather than gluttonous.

I was going to try the mangoes out in pancakes, but wasn't sure what would happen. I've never cooked a mango, and I can't really see how it would add anything. Like strawberries, I think they're probably best enjoyed as they are. Also, these honey mangoes are so juicy that I'm worried that they'd turn to mush during cooking, like strawberries - anything with a high water content like that doesn't take well to heat. I'm still tempted to try them in a coconut-scented pancake batter, but French toast seemed a safer option. One of my favourite ways of having fruit for breakfast is to place it against a fairly bland canvas of sweet bread or plain pancake batter; that way its colours and flavours get to shine. It also means you rarely need to add any sugar to your breakfast, because the flavour of the fruit is intense enough. I probably eat enough sugar during the day without having to have it for breakfast too (although I make an exception for jam, which is an excellent substance).

I've made vanilla- and almond-flavoured French toast before, to pair with rhubarb or strawberries for the former and apricots for the latter. You get the merest hint of flavour, but the fruit is complemented rather than overpowered. For coupling with mangoes, coconut was the obvious choice, especially as it had worked so well with my cheesecake. I added a little coconut essence to the milk and egg mixture for soaking the bread, and then sprinkled the bread with desiccated coconut before pan-frying. I'd normally sprinkle it with demerara sugar: it caramelises but stays crunchy in the heat, which is what I was hoping to achieve with the coconut. It just adds a nice contrast in texture and an interesting fresh, clean, slightly sweet flavour.

The dense, rich texture of the bread against the juicy mangoes is a delightful combination for breakfast. You're getting all that satisfying starch but it's balanced by the sharpness of crunchy blueberries and the fragrant juice of the golden mangoes. I'm not sure why I put blueberries with the mangoes; I think largely it was an unconscious decision based on how good the colours would look against each other, but most berries would work, or possibly banana or pineapple, or you could just use mango. The blueberries do provide a nice change in texture; these honey mangoes are so ripe that they just melt away in your mouth. You almost need the thick toast to remind you that you're actually eating something. I used wholemeal bread for vaguely health-conscious reasons, but I actually think white would be better with the coconut flavouring.

Yet another dish that I am going to have to mourn when the mangoes run out. Alas.

Coconut French toast with mango and blueberries (serves 2):

• 4 slices from a stale loaf of bread (or slice a fresh loaf and leave the slices out overnight to harden)
• 250ml milk
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp coconut essence (or you could use vanilla)
• 6 tbsp desiccated coconut
• Butter, for frying
• 2 honey mangoes, peeled and sliced
• Half a punnet of blueberries

Beat the egg with the milk and coconut essence, then pour into a baking dish. Lay the bread in the mixture for 10 minutes, then turn over and leave for another 10 minutes - you want it to absorb all the liquid. If it still has dry patches and all the liquid has gone, add a bit more milk.

Heat a large knob of butter in a frying pan until foaming. Sprinkle the upward side of the bread with half the desiccated coconut, then place it coconut side down in the butter. Sprinkle the other side with the rest of the coconut while it sizzles in the pan. Cook for about 5 minutes until golden, then flip over and cook for another 5 minutes or so - it should be quite firm. 

Serve the toast piled high with the fruit scattered over, and maybe a bit more desiccated coconut sprinkled on top.

Tracklements Mustard Factory Tour

I didn't watch much of Jamie Oliver's series about unhealthy eating in America, but one moment does stand out. He went to a school in the most obese state in the US, armed with a basket of vegetables. These he held up, one by one, to the class and asked them to name the vegetable. None of them could. We're not talking about weird things like kohlrabi and jerusalem artichokes, which I probably wouldn't have been able to identify until about four years ago, but your most fundamental foodstuffs. It was particularly heartbreaking to see none of the children able to identify a potato. Yet when Jamie held up a box of chips, they unanimously recognised it, screaming with glee: "FRENCH FRIES!" Jamie again held up the potato next to the chips: "Do you know that this comes from this?" he asked. Blank looks all around.

While this is an extreme example, it is true that in the last few decades we have become detached from where our food comes from. Do we really ever consider, chomping down on a Big Mac and fries, the cows and potatoes that, many many stages back before they became processed rubbish, formed the building blocks of said meal? It's often worst with those everyday, mundane foodstuffs that we take for granted: tomato ketchup is rarely called by its full name - when was the last time you thought about the production process of ketchup? The fact that it actually involves tomatoes? I have a friend who claims to hate tomatoes but will happily cover food in ketchup, which just goes to show how estranged from the original much of our food has become.

So when I was kindly invited by Tracklements, producers of many, many award-winning sauces, relishes, jams, pickles and chutneys, to visit their mustard fields and factory and see how the condiment is produced, I paused and realised that I had absolutely no idea where mustard comes from. Mustard, to most people - including myself at this point - is something bright yellow that comes in a jar or a squeezy bottle, right? I bet that not many people have ever considered the natural raw material that ends up as this viscous yellow substance. It's almost as if mustard is harvested in this state, perhaps from some kind of mustard swamp or a giant mustard plant that you can tap to extract. I know of mustard seeds, and have used them in cooking, but had never really given thought to the fact that mustard is a living, growing crop like any other. I wondered how you turned dry, pebbly mustard seeds into the moist, thick substance you can spread in a ham sandwich or squeeze in a lurid strip onto a plastic-looking hotdog. The trip was fascinating and really opened my eyes.

We were met by Guy Tullberg of Tracklements and taken first to the mustard field, where he explained to us the history of the mustard. 'Tracklements' is a Lincolnshire term for traditional accompaniments for meat and cheese. The company was started by William Tullberg, who in 1970 began to make the first wholegrain English mustard, seeking a variety that did not exist at the time (the only readily available mustards were Colman's yellow or brown). Guy told us that the reason for William's obsession with mustard was that he worked in a sausage factory whose sausages were so disgusting he needed mustard to disguise the taste (a buyer at Tesco pronounced them "revolting", and apparently the specification for the sausage was worse than for prison sausages). Having tried the French

moutard a l'Ancienne

, William came across a mention in John Evelyn's diaries (1641-1697) of what appeared to be the English equivalent. After a few trials and experiments, he started to make the occasional batch of mustard, to serve at sausage and mash parties. Its popularity grew among friends and neighbours until one day he was asked to make a couple of dozen jars for the pub, which he packaged and labelled as 'Urchfont Mustard', and the business developed from there. Guy recalls his father making his first batch of mustard "in a dustbin in the kitchen"; Tracklements now make twelve different types of mustard which they sell to around 1200 delis across the UK, as well as Waitrose and Ocado.

Tracklements still make mustard to the original recipe, derived from John Evelyn's diaries - it includes whole chillies, peppercorns and allspice as well as the mustard seed. "What I love is the idea that all those spices were just coming into people's lives at the time", Guy said. His father, apparently, was visited by Trading Standards after he began making and selling his own mustard. They told him he couldn't call it mustard, because "mustard is bright yellow". William showed the inspector Evelyn's diaries, and apparently the dispute was settled. (Incidentally, the reason a lot of mustard is bright yellow is just because of the addition of turmeric). Technology has moved on somewhat since John Evelyn wrote about mustard, however - his recipe calls for a 'quern', an ancient pair of stones used to grind grains and other foodstuffs (sometimes cannon balls, rolled on a hard stone surface, were used), but Tracklements use an industrial grinder (albeit one that is a quarter of a century old).

The 25-year old mustard grinder, still in business.

"I don't believe there's much new in food," Guy told us. "We think we're great experimenters, but it's all been done before. Just look at onion marmalade - there's a recipe existing for it from the mid-eighteenth century." When Tracklements started making onion marmalade, "Trading Standards all over the country went bananas. So between my father and myself we produced 26 pages of historical facts to show that onion marmalade had existed for years." A similar furore occurred over Tracklements' production of Cumberland Sauce, which Trading Standards objected to because it didn't come from Cumberland. "And yet you wouldn't hold up a bottle of Worcester sauce and complain that it wasn't made in Worcester."

The Tracklements factory in Wiltshire.

It took a while to convince farmers to plant mustard seed for Tracklements: an incredibly prolific crop, a handful of mustard seeds will produce eight tonnes by its second harvest. Once planted, it is almost impossible to get rid of. One of the oldest cultivated spices, mustard was believed to have been introduced to Britain by the Romans. In 2003, a local farmer agreed to grow it for Tracklements, only two miles from their factory in Wiltshire. A great success, the farm now provides Tracklements with all of their yellow mustard seeds. "We make as good a product as we can all the time, so if we have an opportunity to make something better, to have someone grow something for us, we grab it and go for it." Guy recalls how "last year someone bashed on the back of the van and said, 'I've got a ton of quinces, can you do something with them?' and we said yes, we can. I love that."

The first thing that struck me was the similarity of the mustard plant, with its bright yellow flowers, to rape, that enemy of hayfever sufferers everywhere (however, it definitely doesn't have the same eye-watering properties). Another thing that surprised me was that the entire plant is edible. The leaves have a lovely peppery quality, rather like watercress or rocket (I was itching to steal a bundle and try them out in a pesto or salad). We were shown the little seed pods on the plant, shaped rather like tiny green chillies, and the tiny budding mustard seeds within. Eaten raw, they have a real kick to them.

The field was full of butterflies and bees, flitting amongst the mustard plants that, in some cases, were as tall as me (as you can see from the above photo of Guy and myself...though he is in no danger of being dwarfed by the mustard, as evident from the fact that he had to stoop substantially to be the same height as me).  It was amazing to think that this, with very little processing involved, turns into one of the nation's favourite condiments (incidentally, Tracklements' top-selling products are plain wholegrain mustard, followed by horseradish and onion marmalade). Perhaps surprisingly, when BSE hit the UK, sales of Tracklements mustard went up. "I think more people were going back to their butchers, because they trusted the meat more, and that's where our products were being sold." The plain wholegrain is only the start of Tracklements' mustard selection, however: the range also includes Strong English, Beer, Green Peppercorn, Original Urchfont (with a hint of chilli), French Dijon, Spiced Honey, Horseradish, Organic Tarragon, Organic with Honey, and Lemon.

An artist's palette of different mustards.

After a delightful picnic in the mustard field, sitting on bales of hay, drinking cider and eating ham, cheese and pork pies (with lashings of different mustards, of course - my favourite was the spiced honey, followed closely by the lemon, which are both fantastic with pork and strong cheese), we headed to the Tracklements factory to see the production process in action. The air in the factory was heady with the scent of vinegar and spice; we were shown giant tubs of cardamom pods, dried chillies and peppercorns just waiting to go into the big blue grinder. We saw and felt newly-bottled jars, their contents still hot, and huge mixing pans that can hold enough ingredients for around 360 jars of product. We watched the jars being labelled and packed and examined the imposing-looking machinery (which actually turned out to be simple equipment like a dicer, or a mixing vat). We were dwarfed by absolutely enormous vats of vinegar (Tracklements use three different varieties, depending on the sauce), the scent of which pierced the air like a knife.

We watched Guy make a batch of mustard, throwing handfuls of spices into the grinder, as he informed us that there is no real written recipe; it's all done by feel. I was amazed that he seemed to be doing no measuring whatsoever, just throwing spices in by the bucketful, but I suppose if you've grown up in the business you've probably got it memorised by now. The smell from the grinding mustard and spices was amazing; we were able to taste the mustard seeds before and after being crushed, and notice their flavour intensifying. The advantage to grinding the spices minutes before processing them into Tracklements mustard is that all the essential oils are retained; it's the same reason why cookery writers will always advise you to buy whole spices and grind them yourself. Plus, you'd have to be a bit mad to forego the amazing smell of ground spices that emanated from the 25 year old grinder in the factory, still going strong.

We met Sam, the mustard maker, who showed us how the ground mustard seed and its accompanying spices are doused in vinegar in a large vat and then stirred every day with an enormous paddle to allow the spices to soak up the liquid and the flavours to develop (during busy periods Tracklements can make 30 barrels of mustard in a day). It wasn't particularly surprising to learn later that Sam is in fact a champion boxer - you need some pretty impressive arm muscle to stir mustard that has been thickening for a week (I should know - I tried it, pathetically prodding it with the plastic paddle and entirely unable to achieve so much as a full clockwise stir).

Sam, mustard-maker extraordinaire.

As Guy remarked, the Tracklements factory contains "everything you'd find in a home kitchen, only bigger" - choppers, grinders, pans, spoons. The raw materials are all natural, and the best Tracklements can find. "If I went to the cooks and put a big bag of garlic powder in their kitchen, five minutes later it would end up back on my desk. 'We don't want to use this', they'd say. I think that's really important." It's a far cry from the kind of factory where everything goes into a closed machine system and comes out processed to oblivion and ready for sale. Guy recalled a trip to a mustard factory in France, where he noticed a valve in one of the machines. Asked what it was for, the factory owner told him that he used it to alter the quantity of air in the mustard - if asked by a supermarket to produce the same sized jar of mustard for, say, one euro instead of four, he would just add more air to the existing mustard. I was slightly horrified by this.

Guy was keen to impress upon us the notion of a "happy food business". Tracklements, and the small delis they stock ("our bread and butter"), may be small businesses, but they are happy ones. "I love that," he said. "As you go further up the scale, moving up to places like Asda and Tesco, things probably aren't so happy there. We're trying to be as good and honest with good as we can be." He sees Tracklements as "not really reinventing, much more rescuing" sauces and condiments, often starting from a historical background to make a new product. Guy cites Tracklements' new fruit cheeses as an example of this approach. "I can find cheese recipes for every fruit that ever existed in old books. If you hadn't seen that before - for example, a gooseberry cheese spiced with nutmeg - you'd think it modern, but it's not. It's very, very ancient."

"We always say that 'you won't find a kumquat in the factory'. We try not to make things for effect, we try to make things with some sort of provenance. There's a reason those old recipes work - they would have been safe from a preserving point of view, as they were made to sit on the shelf for a year. We'll make six jars upstairs in the test kitchen, then multiply that by 30 or 40. We make a batch and off we go." Guy recalls a "fabulous lemon pickle from one of those old books. I thought, wow, that sounds really interesting. It involved chopping up lemons, salting them for 24 hours, washing the salt off, then adding mustard seed, spice, and horseradish. It was 250 years old, that recipe. I thought it was delicious." Unfortunately, the product didn't sell very well, which Guy thinks is "because it was called lemon pickle. We should have called it 'Uncle John's pickle' or something."

He recalls the time Tracklements took their products to the Italian market, the Slow Food festival in Turin. While attempting to sell very traditional British items to the Italians might seem difficult, Guy believes products like Tracklements' transcend cultural boundaries. "The thing to do is just let people taste it. They ask 'what does it go with?' and I tell them, 'whatever you want it to'." I am living testament to this: a huge fan of Tracklements Crabapple Jelly, I shun their recommendation to serve it with roast pork and instead have devoured mine plain on toast, with strong cheddars, game, and even with smoked mackerel.

(However, telling an Italian that Tracklements sauces go very well with "cane" did not go down too well - there is a very subtle distinction in pronunciation between the Italian words for meat, carne, and dog, cane). "They were a little bit horrified."

Top left - my own personal jar of Tracklements mustard, never to be opened, but savoured visually until I am old and grey.

I had a thoroughly enjoyable day at the mustard field and factory; I've never been to a food factory before and it was wonderful to see how a raw material is turned into the end product on the shop shelf. I'd always thought of factories as rather intimidating places, but the Tracklements factory was so small and intimate, and it was great to see no bizarre things being done to the food - as Guy said, it's basically your average home kitchen, but on a bigger scale. I have to admit that I never really ate mustard before this day, but now I'm a little bit of a convert, especially with all the exciting Tracklements varieties available, and especially because I was sent home with a bag groaning under the weight of six jars of mustard (one of which was specially customised with my name on the label, which sent me into something bordering on a paroxysm of joy - it's the small things in life).

New marketing campaign for Tracklements Spiced Honey mustard, I'm certain.

So eager was I, in fact, to start experimenting that I made this mustard-themed dish as soon as I got home. I very rarely see a recipe, think "yum", and am so keen that I end up cooking it that day, so this is testament to my excitement about all things mustard-related. It's based on one of the recipes in the Tracklements catalogue, for chicken stuffed with mustard and wrapped in bacon, but I adapted it a bit by using cream cheese instead of cheddar and mascarpone, and wrapping the chicken in Parma ham rather than bacon, because I love the wafer-thin saltiness it brings to a dish, particularly after crisping in the heat of the oven. 

I also added some thyme to lift and freshen the flavours, and because its lovely jade green colour looked beautiful against the pink ham and pale chicken. The Tracklements recipe uses Original mustard, but I used the Spiced Honey variety, because I thought the sweetness would work very well with the salty ham. I baked my chicken on a bed of mushrooms, which ended up dark and caramelised, saturated in the salty juices from the chicken and the ham, with a hint of honeyed sweetness from the mustard. My boyfriend also heard 'mustard' and demanded mustard mash, so I served the whole thing on top of a big mound of gloriously fluffy, spiced mashed potato. We ate it outside in the glorious summer evening, with large glasses of white wine. An excellent end to a very interesting day.

Mustardy stuffed chicken wrapped in Parma ham on mustard mash (serves 2):

• 2 free-range chicken breasts
• 4 slices Parma ham
• 4-6 heaped tbsp garlic and herb cream cheese
• 2 tsp mustard (or more, depending on how much you like mustard)
• A few sprigs thyme
• 2 large potatoes, cut into chunks and peeled if you like (I never bother)
• Salt and pepper
• Olive oil
• Milk and butter
• A packet of mushrooms, sliced
• Green beans, to serve

First, pre-heat the oven to 180C. Bring a large pan of water to the boil.

Lay out two slices of Parma ham next to each other and slightly overlapping. Place the chicken breast in the middle. Make a slit through the chicken breast and open it out (but don't cut it in half). Mix the cream cheese with 1tsp of the mustard and some thyme leaves, and use half of this to stuff the chicken breast. Close it and wrap in the ham, then repeat with the other chicken breast.

Place the sliced mushrooms in an oven dish and drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper. Place the wrapped chicken on top, scatter with thyme sprigs, and put it in the oven for 20-25 minutes, or until cooked through.

Meanwhile, boil the potatoes until tender, then mash with the salt, pepper, mustard, milk and butter to taste.

Serve the chicken and mushrooms on top of the mustardy mash with some steamed green beans alongside.

I'm quite the mustard convert now (as evident from the rather silly photo above), and can't wait to try it out in other recipes. I'd like to thank Tracklements, particularly Guy and Becky, for a really fantastic day out, and Emma at Wild Card for inviting me.

Vaguely healthy berry muffins

For all they parrot about wanting to help customers make healthy choices, coffee chains clearly don't actually want this. If they did, they wouldn't attach the prefix 'skinny' to lower-calorie choices. I don't know about you, but I can never actually bring myself to utter the words "skinny muffin", "skinny latte" or "skinny double-chocolate mocha" (and I usually think the latter is only likely to merit the response "Yeah, you wish, fatty" from the barista). It just sounds ludicrous in every way, and there's something dreadfully uncool about opting for lower-calorie varieties. It makes me sound like I take myself far too seriously, like I think I'm some A-list celebrity whose fast-paced and pressurised career means she must live entirely off skinny lattes and not a single molecule of fat must pass her lips. 

This is clearly not the case. I write a food blog - I am obviously not the girl in the coffee queue clutching a skinny muffin and asking for a skinny latte. However, I do appreciate the inclusion of apparently less fattening muffins at the counters of Starbucks and the like. It's just that I hate the notion of a 'skinny' muffin. No one gets skinny by eating muffins. Unless they are muffins made out of air. There's a reason why a common name for the fat that hangs over one's too-tight trousers is 'muffin top'. Also, most of these so-called skinny muffins are laden with sugar and other weird things to make up for their lack of fat, so their health benefits over the normal variety are debatable. That said, I'd definitely be better off eating one of these than doing what I used to do every Saturday as a teenager: skip lunch and just eat a Starbucks triple chocolate muffin between breakfast and dinner (needless to say, that one is not of the 'skinny' variety). Ohh, those sweet white chocolate chunks in their dark, unctuous blanket of spongy, buttery, cocoa-ridden sugary goodness...

Unfortunately, my metabolism is probably not what it was back then. However, every now and again (and by that I mean daily...or hourly...) I just get a craving for something cakey, slightly sweet, slightly stodgy, and preferably packed with juicy pieces of fruit (look, I've grown up - I now like fruit instead of chocolate in my baked goods!). In the interests of not being enormous, I've come up with these muffins. I call them 'vaguely healthy' (as opposed to last week's 'super healthy' banana bread) because they still have added sugar in them, and they're full of fruit and seeds which, while very good for you, are not exactly calorie-free. (Actually, I was initially going to call them the 'Anti Muffin-top Muffin' but it didn't sound quite right.) However, there's no butter, just a little olive oil and egg white, so they're definitely a slightly more healthy choice than normal muffins, which are made with quite a lot of butter and/or oil. They're also packed with nutritious berries, seeds, bananas, wholemeal flour and oats. 

The use of banana keeps them really moist and squidgy in the middle, meaning you're likely to have to eat half of the muffin off its paper case, but I like to think that is rustic and pleasing. They have an interesting nuttiness from the wholemeal flour, oats, seeds and mixed spice, and I generally think they're a lot more fun to eat than a boring, homogenous, mass-produced coffee shop muffin. Particularly when you get a lovely piece of juicy, tart, unburst berry or a chunk of banana that escaped the mashing process. If you have any berries lying around in the freezer (and anyone who has read about my freezer hoarding habit will be entirely unsurprised by the fact that I currently have 5 punnets of redcurrants, two of gooseberries, three of blueberries, two of raspberries and one of blackberries), this is a great way to use them up - you can just add them frozen to the mixture and put it straight in the oven. 

If you have the kind of craving that only cake can satisfy, then you're at least better off eating one of these than your average Starbucks muffin, crammed full of preservatives and fat. See these as my contribution to the 'skinny' muffin genre...just don't make me call them that. 

Vaguely healthy berry muffins (makes 12):

• 150g wholemeal self-raising flour
• 150g white self-raising flour
• 1 tsp bicarb of soda
• 50g light muscovado sugar
• 2 tbsp honey
• 1 tsp mixed spice
• 4 tbsp mixed seeds (I used linseeds, pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds)
• 50g oats plus 1 tbsp for sprinkling
• 2 medium bananas, as ripe as possible
• 280ml buttermilk or yoghurt
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 3 egg whites
• 200g mixed berries (I used raspberries and blueberries)
• 1-2 tbsp demerara sugar

Pre-heat the oven to 170C. Line a 12-hole muffin tin with muffin cases. 

Sift the flour and bicarb into a bowl and add the sugar, honey, mixed spice, oats and seeds.

In a separate bowl, mash the bananas together and mix with the buttermilk, oil, and egg whites. Pour this into the dry mixture and quickly mix together with a spoon until just combined - don't over mix and don't use an electric beater. Stir in the berries and dollop the mixture into the muffin cases. 

Sprinkle the oats and sugar over the top of the mixture then bake in the oven for 20 minutes. Very good eaten whilst still warm.

ProCook: a review

I was recently sent a couple of things by ProCook to review. ProCook was set up in 1996 as a small family business, but has rapidly expanded to become the UK's leading specialist cookware company (they've also been recognised by Saturday Kitchen and Grand Design). They offer own-brand cookware, knives, utensils and bakeware that are built to last, as evidenced by extensive guarantees, and have 17 stores around the UK as well as a very easy-to-use website. They even have an own-brand ProCook kitchen clock; a quick glance at their website will show that they're pretty equipped for catering to all culinary needs, from aprons to pestles and mortars. I'd heard of the brand before but never tried any of their products, so I was interested to see how I got on with them.

The first item I was sent is a chopping board from the new ProCook beech utensil range (the collection also includes rolling pins, spatulas, and wooden spoons). These items are crafted in one piece from natural beech and treated with natural mineral oil for durability. There are three different varieties of chopping board: double-sided, smooth, and thick cut. The smooth boards have silicon feet to keep them in place (which I've never seen before on a chopping board, and is a good idea), and the thick cut board (3.2cm thick) has hand holes in the sides. I was sent the double-sided board, which on one side has a groove running around the edge. It's a very practical feature - I often get frustrated when chopping things like fruit on boards because the whole thing becomes a horrible waterlogged puddle. The same goes for when you're trying to carve a freshly roasted chicken, and those delicious juices are just running everywhere, off the board and onto the kitchen worktop. Not ideal. The grooved side of the chopping board dispenses with this annoyance, catching all that precious liquid. The other side is smooth, for kitchen tasks like dicing, where you want to just be able to scrape all your fruit or veg off the board into a pan or bowl.

I've used this board for a variety of tasks now, and am mostly pleased with it. The only fault I can spot is the texture of the wood. It feels quite rough, and even after its very first contact with a knife the board had quite a few scratches in. Because of this rough surface, fruit juice just soaks into the board rather than running into the grooves along the side, which seems to defeat the purpose of having them there in the first place to catch it. It also means the board is prone to stains; if you're chopping something like beetroot on there, I'm not entirely sure it would wash off completely (I had a hard time getting the pomegranate stains off the first time I used it). I'd suggest if you're going to use these wooden boards, getting a couple and keeping them separate: one for cooked food, one for things like raw meat and fish. Having chopped some garlic on this board I noticed a rather garlicky taste from the banana cake I then sliced on it (after washing it). I think because of the way the wood scratches, particles of food might linger in there, so for hygiene and taste reasons it would be best to use different boards for different things.

However, you can't fault the board on aesthetics; I only normally use white plastic chopping boards, and after using this I am a convert to the wooden variety. Food looks so much better presented on one of these; I would happily place it in the middle of the table underneath a large loaf of bread or some cheeses and invite guests to dig in with a knife. It also makes the rather tedious task of chopping and dicing marginally more pleasurable; at least it looks pretty and you feel rather like a rustic country housewife taking it out of the cupboard (or is that just me?) Maybe it's more of a presentation than a practical item, though ProCook do recommend rubbing the boards with olive oil occasionally to keep them at their best, so that might be the answer to the porous wood problem. These and the smooth boards come in three different sizes, with prices starting from £5, and I think I'm going to treat myself to one, purely for the purpose of being a better setting for the food I photograph than a hideous piece of plastic that, once white, has been so battered and beaten by my cookery antics that it is now a rather murky shade of brownish grey and does not make a good backdrop for anything. Except maybe the bin.

I was also able to try out the new range of Gourmet Steel Saucepans, which features four different sized saucepans, various frying pans, and a stockpot. They're well designed, and clearly have the needs of people who actually cook in mind. The glass lids and handles don't get hideously hot so you can still lift the lid off during cooking without reaching for gloves. The handle is also easier to use than some of my other pans, which just have a knob that is pretty tricky to lift when you're encumbered by oven gloves. 

The lids also have little holes in on each side to allow drainage - no need for a colander when boiling vegetables or pasta - and the holes come in two different sizes, suitable for draining pretty much anything. The saucepans also have a lip for pouring, which is quite handy and has already saved me causing a lot of mess. The handles are sturdy and easy to grip, and even when full of liquid the pan is pretty easy to manoeuvre. The finish on the saucepans isn't really non-stick, as you'd expect from a frying pan, but I've made a paella and a stir-fry in it and had no real problems with food sticking or burning. Maybe avoid using it to scramble eggs or cook pancakes, but other than that it's a great, sturdy pan ideal for most kitchen tasks.

For more details about the ProCook range (they don't just do chopping boards and pans), visit their website.

Mango, coconut and cardamom cheesecake

O, Alphonso mango season. How cruelly fleeting you are. Just when I've become hooked again on your luscious, juicy, fiery fruits of joy they are barbarously snatched away from under my nose and I am plunged headlong into a pit of gastronomic despair, forced to pine away for the next year in anticipation of the next time I can suck the honeyed nectar from those orbs of liquid gold, forced to make do with green-skinned, string-fleshed supermarket specimens that take a lifetime to ripen and then are never worth the wait. Here I sit, quietly weeping in my pit of despair, a bowl of inferior mangoes sitting in my fruit bowl, dreading the inevitable moment when I slice them open to reveal pale yellow mush with the mouthfeel of garden twine, fit only for the smoothie maker. Oh, alas.

Overdramatic? No. If you've ever tasted an Alphonso mango, you will understand my sorrow. Indeed, the first time I introduced a friend of mine to an Alphonso mango, she texted me the following:

"Elly this mango is divine. I literally feel like it might transubstantiate on its way down my oesophagus."

Enough said, really. However, for those of you sharing in my distress, there is a remedy. The honey mango.

These mangoes start to arrive just as the Alphonso season ends. They come from Pakistan and, like Alphonso mangoes, will rarely be found in the supermarket. You're most likely to obtain these treasures from an Indian grocery shop, where they are sold by the box at often bargainous prices (I got two boxes - nine mangoes - for £7). The tell-tale sign that these are something special, wildly different from the supermarket variety, is the aroma that greets you as you stand within a three metre radius of them. 'Honey' mangoes suddenly seems a very accurate name: the scent of them hangs thick and heavy in the air, sweet and musky, almost sickly but in a beautiful way, with notes not only of honey but also of toffee and butterscotch. The boxes sat on my desk for a day, tantalisingly emitting their heady aroma as I tried to work; eventually I succumbed. I sliced the flesh away from the stone, cut it into a hedgehog shape and sucked it from the skin. The juice is likely to dribble down your wrist as you eat one of these mangoes. That is how a mango should be.

Not quite Alphonsos, but I think these mangoes have a charm of their own. They lack the tartness of an Alphonso mango, possessing a rather more mellow, sultry flavour. It's earthy, somehow, and musky. While probably not flavoursome enough to hold their own in a sorbet, I really wanted to try out a dessert with these mangoes, especially because they were fairly cheap, unlike the Alphonsos, which I couldn't bear - at nearly £2 a mango - to do anything with other than suck them greedily from the skin until my mouth was neon yellow. I've never attempted to cook a mango, and decided nothing good could come of it in this case, so any form of tart or crumble was out. I hate cream, so a mango fool was not an option. I don't know why I'm even saying this, as it's not as if that was my actual thought process. No - I just immediately went "cheesecake". And that was it.

As I said, I didn't want to cook these gorgeous specimens, so an unbaked cheesecake was going to be the way forward. I deliberated for a while about exactly what I wanted this cheesecake to be. Very light, quite firmly set, studded with pieces of juicy, slightly grainy mango flesh. A crunchy biscuit base to contrast. A filling not overly sweet, to allow the mango to shine. I toyed with the idea of a lime-flavoured cheese filling, but I worried about overpowering the mango. What I really wanted was something quite rich and creamy, but ultimately fairly subtle, to complement the stunning golden flesh. I settled on coconut, after contemplating both vanilla and white chocolate. Mango and coconut are about as right for each other as me and Alphonso mangoes. They are a happy, happy partnership (albeit one tinged with sadness and crushing withdrawal symptoms - like all good relationships, I suppose).

The best thing about this is how simple the recipe is. The biscuit base is a classic mixture of crumbled digestive biscuits and melted butter. Or at least, it was before I had a brainwave. Cardamom. Maybe it's because I associate mangoes with India, and to me cardamom is a quintessentially Indian spice. As I removed the baked cheesecake base from the oven, it suddenly occurred to me that some cardamom in there could be no bad thing. Too late to mix it into the biscuits, I just crushed a few pods and sprinkled the ground seeds over the top of the base. I was worried it would be too overpowering, but in fact I think it was the secret to this cheesecake's deliciousness. 

I think cardamom might be my new favourite spice (but no, you won't be finding me at 'Cardamoms, seven' shortly). It's incredibly hard to pinpoint its flavour. There's something about it that makes me think of citrus, but also a floral quality, which I think is why it works so well with rose. It has a very clean taste, almost lemony, but if asked to describe it in one word, I would fail miserably. Yet I feel, as a cook, there is much to be exploited from cardamom, and I'll definitely be experimenting with it now. It works so well in sweet situations. Against the buttery biscuits of the cheesecake and the subtle coconut mixture, it did something magical.

The actual cake is a simple mixture of Quark (fat free cream cheese), cream cheese, icing sugar, coconut essence, and gelatine to set it. I stirred chopped mango into the mixture before pouring it onto the base to set in the fridge. It's so simple, but the results are so utterly wonderful. To decorate, I was going to just scatter a cubed mango across the top, but then had the idea of cutting the flesh into strips and making a sort of star pattern, laying them across the cake from the middle outwards. After one of them accidentally curled over, I realised a much better idea would be to just lay them across the cake in sinuous randomness. I think it looks beautiful. A sprinkling of desiccated coconut was the finishing touch.

I can safely say that this is the best cheesecake I have ever made. It is even better than I hoped it would be. I guessed the amount of gelatine, but it was absolutely perfect - the set is not too firm, like jelly, but thick enough to enable the cake to slice easily and to almost disappear on the tongue. The chunks of mango add a pleasing juiciness and sweetness, but their flavour is subtle enough to complement the cheese mixture, which has a very slight coconut flavour but one not strong enough to overpower anything - you probably wouldn't guess the coconut was there from the taste, but it definitely adds something extra. The real star, though, is the cardamom biscuit base. I'm now considering making a cardamom-flavoured digestive biscuit, because the two things together are so incredible. It lifts the cheesecake to new heights altogether; buttery, fragrant, sweet with spice. 

"This tastes like India", one of my friends said a couple of bites into her piece. I take that as a big compliment, as I have never been to India, but took my inspiration from flavours I associate with the country. Perhaps "this tastes like Pakistan" would have been more accurate, given the provenance of the mangoes, but as this cake is both a homage to the honey mango and a lament for the Alphonso mango (from Mumbai), the Indian connection is important, I feel.

Another excellent bonus of this cheesecake is it's fairly low-fat - Quark has no fat and I used light cream cheese. Without the buttery biscuit base (which reminds me - this video had me crying with laughter earlier in the week - if you've seen Masterchef, even only once, please, please click the link. I guarantee it'll be the funniest thing you've seen all day), you could even say this was a low-fat cheesecake. I even used 'light' digestive biscuits, so I did in fact tell myself it was healthy. Which is great, because then you can eat more of it.

One of my friends also pointed out that, when sliced, the cake looks a bit like one of those decorative soaps you can get with different coloured squarey bits in them (not a great description, but hopefully you know what I mean). I think it looks a bit like nougat. The contrast between the creamy coconut and the chunks of juicy fruit is even better than the rather lovely colour contrast would have you anticipating.

Mango, coconut and cardamom cheesecake (serves 6-8):

• 10 digestive biscuits
• 50g butter, melted
• 8 cardamom pods, seeds crushed to a powder
• 2 ripe honey mangoes
• 250g Quark
• 150g light cream cheese
• 150g icing sugar
• 1 tsp coconut essence
• 1 sachet gelatine
• 3 tbsp boiling water
• 2 tbsp desiccated coconut

Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Blitz the biscuits in a food processor and mix with the melted butter and cardamom. Scatter over the base of a greased, lined springform cake tin (mine was 18cm diameter, but 20cm would work too) and press down with the back of a spoon to form an even layer. Bake for 5-10 minutes until golden and aromatic. Leave to cool.

Meanwhile, mix the Quark, cream cheese, icing sugar and coconut essence together with an electric mixer. Peel one of the mangoes and dice into small cubes.

Place the boiling water in a small bowl and sprinkle over the gelatine. Leave for a couple of minutes to partially dissolve, then stir to dissolve completely - if it hasn't all dissolved, heat in the microwave for a few seconds. Have the electric mixer ready, and pour the gelatine mixture into the cheese mixture. Whisk thoroughly to incorporate, then quickly fold in the diced mango. Pour over the biscuit base and place in the fridge for a few hours to set (I left mine overnight).

To decorate, slice the other mango into thin strips and arrange on top of the cake. Sprinkle with desiccated coconut and finish with mint leaves, if you like.

Spanish rice with cod cheeks

Maybe it's the result of several adolescent years spent keeping fish in a tank, but I always find it slightly mind-boggling that some fish can grow so enormous. Until a few years ago I was under the impression that tuna were tiny, and that you needed several of them, minced up, to fill a can. I'm not sure why; I suppose I identified them with the diminutive goldfish that I'd watch floating placidly around my aquarium every night. It wasn't until I read an article in the paper about a bluefin fish going on sale for some crazy price in Japan, complete with photo of the monstrous aquatic specimen, larger than the man who was attempting to fillet it, that I realised my mistake. The same goes for salmon - often presented in fillet or smoked form, you're rarely faced with a whole specimen and are lulled into a vague sense of thinking that a whole salmon is roughly the size of one of its fillets, as would be the case for something like sea bass. I once got a whole salmon from the fishmonger for a Boxing Day dinner; it had to go in the oven diagonally and even then barely fit on a baking sheet.

So it is with cod. You often buy or are served cod in a thick steak, but it's hard to gauge from this just how big the fish it came from was. When I first saw cod cheeks on a menu, I raised an eyebrow. Surely there's not enough meat on a cod head to get anything worth cooking? How very wrong I was, as I found out last week when I bought a bag of cod cheeks from the fishmonger at the market. I can never resist an unusual ingredient, and after my success with pigs' cheeks I am eager to experiment with the facial flesh of mammals and fish, morbid as it may sound. Not only is there enough meat, but in some cases cod cheeks are pretty sizeable, about as big as a decent scallop. They look a little bit like scallops, too - thick, white medallions of flesh, ideal for sizzling in a very hot pan until caramelised on the outside yet sweet and juicy in the centre. The beauty of them is that they have no bones, so can be used in things like fishcakes without having to faff around picking the meat.

I didn't want to mask their flavour and texture by putting them in a fishcake, though. Instead I thought I'd serve them like scallops, with some sort of accompaniment to bulk them up a bit and provide complementary flavours. I toyed with the idea of braising some peas, lentils and bacon and serving the cod cheeks on top, and I intend to try that another time. However, my mind initially jumped to paella, with the flavours of saffron, tomatoes, paprika, peas and herbs. I'm not sure why; probably because white fish with tomatoes and paprika (often in the form of chorizo) is a great combination. I thought the flavoursome rice would be perfect with the cod cheeks; good enough to eat on its own, but even better when coupled with the sweet fish. I made a sort-of paella (I wouldn't go so far as to call it an actual paella, but it has similar flavours) with a base of sautéed carrot, celery, onion, garlic and chopped baby plum tomatoes, to which I added paella rice, some home-made fish stock from the freezer, paprika, saffron, peas, and a scattering of chopped dill and lemon thyme.

I fried the cod cheeks in a little olive oil as I would scallops, then served them atop the rice. I was surprised by their sheer deliciousness; they have that sweet juiciness that you only seem to get from cod, and although their flesh is a little more chewy, it means much more flavour than you'd get from a fillet. I could probably eat a plateful on their own - apparently a good way to serve them is to dip them in batter and deep fry them, a bit like scampi, which sounds sublime. The rice here is a good background to the fish, flavoursome but not too overpowering, and gives the dish a bit more substance. Some prawns or squid stirred into the rice would be nice, too. I am glad I've discovered this unusual ingredient, and can't believe it's not more popular - the low price of cod cheeks is indicative that they haven't gone trendy yet, for which I am very thankful.

I am a little unsure, despite their goodness, of the ethical issues regarding cod cheeks - cod has a lot of sustainability problems. I am wondering if it's good to eat the cheeks because they're a by-product of the cod process, and would be going in the bin if we didn't eat them (there is still a demand for cod, like it or not, and I suppose we may as well make the most of the whole fish if we're going to be catching it)...or if I should stop buying them and decrease demand for this endangered fish. Any ideas?

Spanish rice with cod cheeks (serves 2):

• Olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• Half an onion, finely chopped
• A carrot, finely chopped
• A stick of celery, finely chopped
• Two handfuls of baby plum tomatoes, finely chopped
• A generous pinch of saffron
• 1/2 tsp paprika
• 150g paella rice
• About 500ml hot fish stock
• A generous handful of frozen or fresh peas
• Herbs, to finish (I used dill and lemon thyme, but parsley would be good too)
• 300g cod cheeks
• Salt and pepper
• Lemon wedges, to serve

Heat a little oil in a non-stick saucepan and saute the garlic, onion, carrot, tomatoes and celery until softened. Add the saffron, paprika and paella rice and cook for another couple of minutes, stirring.

Pour in the fish stock, bring to the boil, then turn down and simmer for 15-20 minutes, until the liquid has been mostly absorbed (add a little more boiling water if you think it looks too dry near the end) - don't stir like a risotto, just leave it to bubble. Towards the end, add the peas and cook for 5 minutes or so, then stir in the herbs once the rice is fully cooked. Taste to check the seasoning - you might want more paprika or salt.

Heat a little more oil in a frying pan until hot. Season the cod cheeks with salt and pepper, then fry for a couple of minutes on each side - they should be nicely caramelised and soft in the middle.

Serve the cod cheeks on top of the rice, with lemon to squeeze over.

Super-healthy banana bread

Question 1.

Looking at the above photo, what do you see?

a) Four bananas.

b) The kitchen bin's next mouthful.

c) A treasure trove of glittering gastronomic potential just waiting to be exploited.

If you answered c), you and I are one of a kind (this may or may not be a good thing, depending on your opinion of me). If you answered a) or b), shame on you - read on and let me change your mind.

A couple of years ago, I too would have thrown out those bananas. I'm very fussy about bananas: they have to be at the perfect point of ripeness for me to enjoy them, which for me is when they still have a slight green tinge - at this point they are quite firm and sweet, without that earthy banana flavour you get from riper specimens. Any hint of a black speckle on the skin, and I will treat the banana with caution. It will be chopped up and stirred into my muesli or porridge for breakfast, or I might mash it up and make banana pancakes, but it goes nowhere near my mouth unadulterated. Just so we're clear on that.

However, a couple of years ago I made my first ever banana bread. I've adapted the original recipe a few times since (for example, a coconut and cardamom version, or a version with chocolate chips, or a version with blueberries), but generally, when I see bananas in my fruit bowl starting to go past their best, I rejoice in the anticipation of warm, gooey, oven-fresh banana bread. The key is to use shockingly ripe bananas - if they're starting to ooze out of their black skins, and the action of peeling and mashing them makes you want to retch slightly, they're perfect. Even if they're a bit mouldy, once they're baked you won't even notice. As bananas ripen, they gain much more banana flavour and also sweetness. Make banana bread with green bananas and I doubt it would work at all: you need the squishy ripeness to bind the bread ingredients together, and the flavour is only there once they're starting to go black. I sometimes, if I know I won't have time to bake before the bananas actually have to go in the bin, peel ripe bananas and freeze them. That way you can defrost and mash them whenever you feel like baking with them. They're also good in smoothies.

I decided to experiment with this batch of bananas. I thought I'd try making my existing recipe even healthier, by cutting out the fat completely (I normally use about 50g of butter), using spelt flour instead of wheat flour, and adding in lots of delicious and nutritious things like nuts and dried fruit. The result is so exquisite that you'd never guess it was fat free and good for you. You could even make it free of added sugar by using honey instead of the dark brown sugar. I think the deliciousness is all down to those squishy bananas, which lend the bread a wonderful moistness meaning you don't need any butter, nor much sugar, because they're so sweet. Add to that the crunch of walnuts, the squash of a raisin or piece of dried apricot, the nuttiness of spelt flour, the sweetness and treacley taste of dark brown sugar, and the warm notes of mixed spice and cinnamon, and you have perfection. The outside forms a crust and turns crunchy, while the inside stays gooey and sticky and wonderful. The crunch of the walnuts are probably the best bit; they go so well with the sweet banana flavour. Pecans would be great too.

I was a bit worried when I took this out of the oven, because it had done something completely bizarre and risen up enormously on one side, so that it looked rather like it had some kind of tumour. I can only speculate that maybe the baking powder wasn't evenly distributed or something. However, the misshapen nature in no way affected the beautiful eating experience, so all is well. I like to think it's rustic (I find myself saying that a lot to compensate for presentation/visual errors in cooking...).

My favourite thing about this recipe is its versatility: you could add whatever you like - chocolate chips, chopped dates, oats, poppy seeds, desiccated coconut, cardamom, blueberries, raspberries, almonds...the possibilities are almost endless. So many ingredients work well with the comforting flavour of banana - nuts and seeds are definitely a good idea for their textural contrast, but most fruits would go well in the cake too. Chocolate chips, though they might detract from the healthiness, seem to me a very very good idea - imagining the spongy moistness of the cake rippled with molten, oozing chunks of chocolate is making me salivate.

I'm normally sceptical of baking recipes that purport to be super-healthy, but this one is about as close as you can get - I was actually considering eating it for breakfast, and I'm a bit of a health freak when it comes to breakfast. You could spread it with lashings of butter if you don't go in for this fat-free business, though I don't really think it needs it, especially if it's just come out of the oven. The smell of it baking is also one of the best aromas in the world.

Super-healthy banana bread (makes one loaf):

• 3 very very ripe bananas, peeled and mashed
• 2 eggs
• 80g dark muscovado sugar
• 120ml milk
• 1 tsp coconut essence (or vanilla)
• 1 tsp ground mixed spice
• 300g spelt flour or wholemeal flour
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• Pinch of salt
• Zest of a lemon or orange (or both)
• 100g dried apricots, chopped
• 3 tbsp raisins
• 100g walnuts (or pecans or almonds), roughly chopped

Pre-heat the oven to 180C.

Using an electric or hand whisk, mix together the bananas, eggs, sugar, milk, essence and spices. Add the flour, bicarb, salt and baking powder and mix together to form a loose batter.

Fold in the lemon or orange zest, and the fruit and most of the walnuts. Spoon the batter into a greased, lined loaf tin and sprinkle with the remaining walnuts.

Bake for about 50 minutes.

Fruit picking at Medley Manor Farm

I finished my second degree a week ago today. After a very pleasant afternoon spent in the pub and dinner out with friends, I awoke the next morning full of anticipation, determined to spend the day doing nothing at all in celebration of the end of eighteen years of full-time education. Three hours later, I was bored out of my mind. I just don't do doing nothing. I had grossly over- (or perhaps under-) estimated myself in planning my days of freedom. I decided I would go and buy myself a completely new wardrobe. I had forgotten that I hate clothes shopping and am ultimately a jeans and T-shirt kind of girl. I decided I would laze around in bed all day. I had forgotten that I am a morning person and the thought of sleeping in past nine thirty disgusts me. I decided I would take a day off exercise. I had forgotten that I am nursing a fairly intense endorphin addiction and find being kept away from the swimming pool for more than 24 hours cripplingly painful. Ultimately, I was at a loose end, desperate for something to distract me from crushing, post-dissertation boredom.

I can't remember why it occurred to me then, but I recalled that for over a year now I'd been meaning to visit Medley Manor Farm, a short bike ride out of central Oxford. In the summer months they do Pick Your Own; I think their most popular crop is strawberries, but they also have broad beans, spinach, gooseberries, currants, raspberries and asparagus in season. The farm is down Binsey Lane; it's a very pleasant walk or cycle down a little lane surrounded by fields and plants, the perfect antidote to the rather hectic life of an Oxford Masters student. I could practically feel the stress of the last year melting away as I cycled along, listening to the birds singing, full of anticipation for freshly-picked strawberries and an afternoon of mindless activity that didn't require a single medieval text to be read.





I hadn't been to a Pick Your Own farm for at least a decade, and probably more like a decade and a half. I have vague memories of picking strawberries as a child with my parents, but seeing as I was a hugely fussy eater until the age of sixteen I doubt I ever actually sampled the crop I picked and took home. It's the same as sweets: I used to be obsessed with them as a child, though I didn't actually eat them. I would buy them with my pocket money and hoard them in a little box, fascinated by how many different colours, flavours, textures and types comprised the genre of the humble sweetie. I hesitate about admitting this part, but it might amuse my readers, so here goes: I even designed an Excel spreadsheet, at the age of about seven, in which I would catalogue all the different types of sweets I possessed and how many of each. Lord knows how I've turned out to be a relatively socially competent individual; the Excel spreadsheet and obsessive hoarding of sugary goods were certainly not good omens.



Fortunately, I am now a greedy fruit-lover (and no longer hoard sweets, though I do still make spreadsheets), so the notion of Pick Your Own holds an irresistible allure. Mass-produced supermarket fruit is fine, but it definitely lacks the flavour of something grown on a smaller scale. Largely because of the production processes, but also because the most supermarket-suitable varieties of fruit are not always the most flavoursome. There are so many different types of strawberry, but you'll rarely find anything other than the Elsanta variety in the shops. Imagine my delight upon entering Medley Manor Farm and finding a field of strawberries, with little signs on posts marking off at least ten different varieties. I went from row to row, admiring the changes in shape and colour, and (slightly naughty, but still) nibbling one of each to sample their differences.



There's a certain excitement that goes hand in hand with strawberry picking: the flash of scarlet catching your eye from between a canopy of drooping leaves, indicating a berry ripe and ready for plucking, is almost addictive. I filled a big plastic punnet in what felt like no time at all, stumbling across ripe fruit after ripe fruit. I love the way you can find a plant that seems to have nothing but green, hard berries on it, and then suddenly you'll see a plump, crimson gem nestling under all the leaves just as you're about to move on. It's immensely satisfying to feel like you've chosen your berries, rather than having them packed into a punnet for you by the supermarket's supplier. You can get enormous fat, juicy specimens, but also delicious smaller, slightly tarter varieties all in one box. I tried to mix and match a few of the strawberry varieties, mainly out of curiosity, picking a few from each row, though the biggest and ripest were in fact the Elsanta - I guess that's why the supermarkets like them. They had the most pronounced strawberry flavour, but I found a few of the smaller, slightly sourer types more interesting.



Next, onto raspberries. I clearly have no recollection of raspberry picking as a child, because I was quite surprised to see how tall the raspberry plants grow. It was like plucking grapes off a vine. These are my favourite fruits to pick: I love their slightly soft, almost furry texture, and the way the ripe ones slide off their stems leaving a little white cone. You can tell when they're ready to pick more by the feel of them than the look: some bright pink berries may seem ready for picking, but unless they give slightly and come away from the stem with little resistance, they're best left on the plant. There were two different varieties: Tulameen and Glen Ample, both of which I recognise from supermarket labels. The Glen Ample were slightly smaller and squatter than the Tulameen, and also a little sharper in flavour. They were both huge compared to the stunted, often quite hard raspberries you get in the shops; almost the size of small strawberries, and each one perfectly formed. The ripe ones were a joy to eat, so soft you could crush them with your tongue, and bursting with sweet-sharp juice. I got quite stained fingernails from picking these.

Gooseberries came next; I didn't go too crazy with these because I wouldn't be able to eat them raw, and would have to come up with a use for them (they're now in the freezer until I think of the perfect way to show them off). I was also slightly put off by the thorny bushes; at one point I couldn't tell if it was blood staining my fingers or raspberry juice. Probably a bit of both. However, these gooseberries were beautiful: really round, plump and firm. They were hanging off their bushes in abundance; I think I might have to go back and get some more. I've definitely never seen any that big in the markets, and their larger size is a big plus from a practical point of view: for the same weight, fewer individual gooseberries to top and tail.



Last but certainly not least, currants. I love currants. I always forget this because you don't really see them in the shops, and they only appear in markets for a very brief period of time, but having sampled the ones I picked I'm a true currant convert. You think of summer berries and often forget about the currants, but combined with the sweeter, redder berries they add a real je ne sais quoi: I think it's both their firmer texture and also their almost grassy, fragrant, sour juice. There were lots of blackcurrant bushes, and a few redcurrants, though the farmer told me that the redcurrant crop hadn't been very good this year, perhaps because of weather conditions. I managed to snaffle the few remaining ones, hanging like jewels near the ground on their bushes. They were huge, much bigger than the diminutive berries I've been buying from markets, and so fresh and shiny. The blackcurrants were harder to pick, as you have to prise each individual berry off its branch (they don't grow on a little stalk like redcurrants). I got half a punnet of currants, and then decided it was probably time to pay for my spoils, before I bankrupted myself with berries.





I've been eating this enormous hoard of berries for about a week now, and I cannot stress enough how delicious they are. It might sound obvious, but they are so much better than anything I've ever bought in shops or even markets. I guess because, unlike shop berries, they are picked at the absolute pinnacle of ripeness, rather than a bit early so they're still firm and transport better. The raspberries had sort of welded together in a squashy, juicy mass by the time I had rattled them home in my bike basket, which I see as a very good sign: it shows they were perfectly ripe. They tasted no worse for it; in fact, I think they tasted better, because they had turned more juicy. The strawberries actually tasted of strawberries; they were sweet rather than tart, and full of fragrant juice. The currants are the perfect match for the strawberries, providing a lovely sweet-sourness. One of my favourite ways of eating this mix of berries is stirred into porridge: the creaminess of the oats balances out the sourness of the currants, and then you have the gorgeous juicy strawberries and raspberries for texture and sweetness. They're also delicious on muesli, or served with vanilla ice cream. I thought about using them in a recipe - like the Czech bubble cake - but I think cooking fruit this perfect would be a bit sacrilegious. These are best eaten pure and unadulterated.

Having said that, though, I think a summer pudding would be the perfect thing to do with them: that way you keep each individual berry intact, with all its unique qualities, but create something rather special. I am going to go back and pick some more with this in mind. I'd really recommend a trip to Medley Manor Farm if you're at a loose end and want something to do. I found the whole experience incredibly relaxing; I was the only person in the raspberry field the entire time, strolling up and down the plants in the sunshine, plucking fat red berries from the leaves. It felt very old-fashioned and generally wonderful. In this hectic day and age, where food is normally something procured in a rush in a horrible crowded supermarket, it's so rewarding to be able to spend some time picking your own and being reminded of where your food comes from and the effort that goes into growing it.

The fruit is also quite good value: initially it seems more expensive than the supermarket, but that's because you end up with more than you'd normally buy, as the punnets are so large. I bought two huge punnets of raspberries and strawberries (about a kilo each), a punnet of currants, and half a punnet of gooseberries, plus some wild garlic (there's also a mini farm shop there selling things like garlic, beans, potatoes and spinach), for £14, which isn't bad considering the far superior quality and the sheer enjoyment of picking your own. I can't wait to go back.

(Click here for a guide to PYO farms in the Oxfordshire area)

Riverford dining at Jacobs & Field

Last week I went to Jacobs & Field in Headington for an evening of eating hosted by Riverford Organics. For those of you who haven't heard of either, Jacobs & Field is a lovely little deli/cafe in Headington, about 15 minutes by bike out of Oxford, and Riverford Organics are one of the biggest suppliers of organic vegetable boxes in the country. They deliver fruit and veg (around 47,000 boxes a week) from their various farms around the country to your door, and their Devon Farm is home to the award-winning Field Kitchen restaurant, where chef Jane Baxter dishes up all sorts of exciting creations using the vegetables as the main ingredient. When I first signed up to the veg box scheme I got a free copy of her cookbook, and I love its simple approach to making the best of good-quality fruit and veg. The Jacobs & Field evening, organised by Jake Swinhoe, who supplies boxes to Oxford, was a chance to sample this sort of cooking, using the best of Riverford's produce, in an informal setting.

I thought the idea behind this was great - everyone was seated rather haphazardly at an array of tables (the restaurant was definitely filled beyond capacity, and I felt a bit sorry for the waiting staff who had to pass our plates to other diners so they could reach us) often meaning you'd be sat with people you've never met before, which I think is a great idea - there's nothing like good food to get conversation going, and there's none of that pressure you get in a hushed, expensive dining room to sit silently in reverence of the food and the chef. I also enjoyed the complimentary mint and elderflower presses were were given on arrival - they reminded me a bit of the lemon and mint drink I had in Damascus that I've raved about so much.

We started off with a bowl of fat, juicy, marinated and stuffed olives before moving on to the starter: pea soup with lemon oil and "halloumi croutons", and bruschetta of broad beans and ricotta. The halloumi croutons were really just pieces of halloumi in the soup, but they worked very well: peas always need something slightly salty to bring out their sweetness (think pea and ham), and the cheese also had a nice chewy creaminess to it to contrast with the soup. The bruschetta was rather too toasted to attempt to manipulate with cutlery, but the fat, sweet broad beans were perfect with the ricotta cheese. Broad beans can sometimes taste quite bitter, especially later in the season, but these were delightfully soft against the crunchiness of the bread.



The main course was practically overflowing on the plate, a rustic style of presentation that I like for its generosity (as you will know if you read this blog at all, I am greedy). We had slices of cured meats (chorizo, parma-style ham and a fennel salami), a potato salad with watercress pesto, grilled courgettes with cherry tomatoes and spinach, and - my favourite - fennel gratin. This was amazing: beautiful soft yet still crunchy pieces of fennel in a cheesy, creamy sauce, their fresh aniseed flavour preventing the combination from cloying. They went incredibly well with the salty ham and the delicious pieces of sourdough bread we were given - this was proper sourdough, the kind that reminds you why it's called sour dough. I used it to soak up the gratin sauce. This was a good idea.



Next came the cheese course. I don't think we were told what type of cheese it was, but it came on a little cracker with a delicious dollop of chutney/relish. Finally, for dessert, we had Eton mess and gooseberries in honey saffron custard. I can't comment on the Eton mess, because I hate it - it's my least favourite dessert, mainly because I don't like whipped cream, but also because it's ubiquitous on the menus of so many formal dinners I've been to despite being possibly the laziest, most unglamorous pudding in the world. I have strong feelings about it - though no offence to Riverford, because I can see how it's a good dessert to show off their fantastic strawberries. The gooseberries were delicious: the dessert was rather like a creme brulee without the crunchy topping, the saffron custard delightfully thick and rich, the tartness of the juicy gooseberries a welcome contrast. It would have been nice to have a bit of texture in there, though - a crunchy topping, or some nuts, or a biscuit to accompany it. But again, that's my greed talking.

It was nice to see a meal in which vegetables and fruit played a starring role, rather than a big lump of meat. We had ham and salami, but it was included, I think, to bring out the beauty of the vegetable accompaniments rather than the other way round. Everything was really delicious (my favourite being that wonderful fennel gratin) and yet quite simple in conception and presentation. I've definitely been inspired to do some more cooking with Riverford produce, and also to pay further visits to Jacobs & Field - if you haven't been and are looking for something to do in Oxford, I suggest you go up there and sample some of their cooking. Their sandwiches (I was greedily eyeing the chalkboard menu while waiting for the starter) look incredible, their sourdough bread is sublime, and it generally seems like a bit of a paradise for a keen food-lover (I'm not going to use the word 'foodie', because I absolutely loathe it).

Also, a big thank you to Jake, Riverford and Jacobs & Field for organising this - I can't wait to go to the next one.

Pear, gooseberry and elderflower cobbler

When I start to see gooseberries at the market, I get almost as excited as when I spy first season rhubarb at the market. I feel quite similarly about these two fruits: they're underrated, quintessentially British, and great fun to experiment with in all sorts of recipes, both sweet and savoury. They both work well with mackerel, they both make great jam, and they both add a pleasing tartness and vibrant colour to creamy or baked desserts. One of the classic partners for gooseberries is elderflower; I often wonder who first came up with this idea, but it does work: the elderflower gives a pleasing fragrance and sweetness to what can be a very sharp berry. It also helps to mellow the rather unpleasant aroma of cooked gooseberries; they taste great, but always smell a bit weird, rather like ripening tomatoes. After receiving a box of gooseberries in my organic veg box last week I decided to try them out in a cobbler, my favourite hot pudding. It may be June, but it's pretty damn cold: I'm not abandoning my cobbler in favour of a fool or a sundae just yet.

The recipe booklet in my veg box featured a pear and gooseberry crumble. I would never have thought of combining gooseberries and pears, but it makes sense. A crumble or cobbler with pure gooseberries might be a bit overpowering, as they are quite tart, and also turn to mush during cooking. The inclusion of pear provides some texture - it remains fairly crunchy if you don't pre-cook it - and their flavour is mild enough not to exclude the lovely gooseberries. They also have a nice fragrance about them that works well with the elderflower. You could use apples, but you wouldn't get the same effect.

I love the look of these pears; they have the most beautiful matt, russet skin, which usually suggests a fragrant specimen. I think they are the Bosc variety. I wasn't disappointed, and nibbled my way through a whole one while chopping them for the cobbler; they were quite crunchy, but still flavoursome. I didn't bother to pre-cook them, but if you like your fruit fairly soft and soggy in a crumble then you might want to. After topping and tailing nearly two kilos of gooseberries (a kitchen task second in tedium only to de-bearding three kilos of mussels), they went in two dishes with the chopped pears, a generous splash of elderflower cordial, and quite a lot of caster sugar - gooseberries are extremely unpleasant to eat raw, so you need quite a lot of sugar - the same goes for summer rhubarb. The fruit looked rather beautiful, sitting in the dishes with its frosty sprinkling of sugar. It also, as my friend observed, gave me the opportunity to "show off my Le Creuset collection". I bought a beautiful purple heart-shaped baking dish ages ago at the Le Creuset outlet store and hadn't used it before now.

For the cobbler topping, I rubbed butter into flour and baking powder, added brown sugar, then stirred in some natural yoghurt. This is actually a rather healthy dessert, as there's only a small amount of butter required. It's much less fattening than crumble, and I love cobbler because of the way the top cooks to give a nice crunch. It's essentially a sort of scone dough, dropped in spoonfuls on top of the fruit and left to spread out and fluff up in the oven. Adding demerara sugar to the top gives it a pleasing sugary crunch. You get a nice crisp crust with a lovely fluffy interior, and because it has less fat you can eat twice as much. Brilliant.

About half an hour later, I removed my bubbling cobblers from the oven. Perfect, apart from one small issue: gooseberries emit enough water when cooked to save Britain from drought for the entire summer. I hadn't considered that when I put the dishes into the oven. However, it's a problem easily solved: either add a couple of tablespoons of cornflour to the fruit when you mix it with the sugar and elderflower (it will form a sort of paste and look horrible, but persevere), or pre-cook the gooseberry and pear filling for a few minutes and remove the fruit from its juice with a slotted spoon. I'm not sure which would work best; next time I'll try the cornflour as it's easier. It doesn't really matter though - I just dished up the cobbler with a slotted spoon, so that each portion got all the fruit but wasn't drowning in watery juice.

Despite juiciness, this is really delicious. As I said before, you get a really nice contrast in texture between the squashy berries and the firm chunks of pear, as well as a contrast in tartness; the gooseberries are still quite sour, but the pear is lovely and sweet so they work very well. There's also a hint of sweet elderflower running through the whole thing. Add to that a golden, fluffy scone layer on top, soft underneath where the fruit juice has soaked into it, and you're pretty close to dessert perfection. All you need with it is some good vanilla ice cream - I thought about making a weird and wonderful flavour to go with it, but there are so many nice flavours going on in the cobbler that it would just complicate matters. This is the perfect summer pudding for when the weather consistently proves disappointing.

Pear, gooseberry and elderflower cobbler (serves 4):

• 4 pears, cored and chopped
• 500g gooseberries, topped and tailed
• 3 tbsp elderflower cordial
• 180g caster sugar
• 2 tbsp cornflour
• 140g plain flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 25g butter
• 25g light brown sugar
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• 150ml buttermilk or natural yoghurt
• Demerara sugar, for sprinkling

Pre-heat the oven to 180C.

Mix the pears, gooseberries, cordial, caster sugar and cornflour in a baking dish. In a separate bowl, rub the butter into the flour and baking powder until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Stir in the ginger and brown sugar. Add the buttermilk or yoghurt, and mix to form a fairly thick, sticky dough. Dollop this in spoonfuls on top of the fruit mixture in the baking dish - you don't have to completely cover it. Sprinkle generously with demerara sugar.

Bake for about 30 minutes, until the topping is golden and the fruit is bubbling around it. Serve with vanilla ice cream.

Cheese tasting with Davidstow and Nathan Outlaw

This week I was lucky enough to be invited to a wine and cheese pairing evening with two-Michelin-star chef Nathan Outlaw, organised by Davidstow Cheddar. If you watch Great British Menu (and if not, why not?) you'll perhaps know of Nathan as I do - talented chef, lover of all things piscine, and pioneer of sea buckthorn, a coastal shrub with very astringent berries that formed part of his locally sourced menu on the programme. Naturally, I was thrilled at the invitation. Nathan has been working with Davidstow Cheddar - Davidstow being just down the road from his award-winning restaurant - to produce a series of recipes using their cheese, a couple of which I've tried recently. The purpose of this evening was to sample some of these recipes, try a range of Davidstow cheeses (including several exclusive varieties not for sale in the shops) complemented by a range of wines (chosen and discussed by Guardian wine writer Fiona Beckett), and hear a bit more about the production of Davidstow cheese from cheese grader Mark Pitts-Tucker.

After I'd sampled a Davidstow Cornish Crackler cheese and potato pasty (deliciously flaky pastry and tangy melted cheese...I could probably have just eaten those all night), we sat down to a brief introduction from Mark about the process of making Davidstow cheese. He stressed the difficulty of a process that uses a variable raw material (milk is not the same all year round, and can even vary according to the time of day), yet tries to achieve a consistent product. Bigger dairies and suppliers tend to standardise their milk before the cheesemaking process, whereas Davidstow take the milk in its natural form and adjust the cheesemaking to suit it. As Mark explained, if you have such a high quality raw material, it's an "offence punishable by death" to tamper with it. Cheesemaking, he believes, is a mixture of nature and nurture: working around the raw product by altering the production process. Mark tastes hundreds of samples of cheddar to ensure each batch is perfect: it is important to find the right balance between body, flavour and texture. Because he was previously involved in cheesemaking before he became a grader, Mark is able to link the taste of the cheese back to his knowledge; if there are any problems, he is able to pinpoint them to a specific part of the cheesemaking process.

The first cheese we sampled was the Davidstow Classic cheddar. Most cheddar on the market is aged for eight to nine months, whereas Davidstow age this one for twelve to thirteen. Because of the slower maturation process, the cheese is more complex with a greater depth of flavour. Mark highlighted the importance of the aftertaste; good cheese should always leave an aftertaste, but one that is not too powerful. We ate this cheese alongside a Voyager Estate Chardonnay 2007; Fiona explained that most people are "very conservative" about cheese and naturally assume red wine is the right choice, yet often the oaky notes in a white like this one can complement the flavours better. She suggested that in this case, the wine is doing the job a piece of fruit on a cheeseboard would normally do, by providing sweetness to offset the richness.



Nathan discussed his recipes for Davidstow, remarking that it had been a challenge to come up with them, as the cheese is of high enough quality to stand on its own. However, he has produced over twelve recipes so far, and if the cheese scone we then tasted was anything to go by, he had successfully taken an excellent ingredient and raised it to new heights (although he did say the recipe took him several attempts to perfect). The cheese scone features Davidstow classic in its mixture, and is topped with pickled celery, grilled Cornish Crackler (another Davidstow cheese, and one I will discuss momentarily), and a slice of ripe fig. The real star here is the pickled celery: it was sweet and crunchy, providing a beautiful freshness and textural contrast to complement the rich cheese and fluffy scone.

The next cheese on the menu was Davidstow Lighter, which has 30% less saturated fat. As Mark observed, the notion of a lighter cheese is "an oxymoron for the cheese purist". However, he explained that there is a growing market for lower fat cheese products, and that the Davidstow version is designed to deliver on flavour but not be overpowering. We drank Camel Valley Pinot Noir Rose Brut with the lighter cheese, and sampled Nathan's recipe: grilled pear and pickled walnuts with the Lighter Classic on toast. Again, this was a perfect harmony of sweetness and richness, with a lovely bit of crunch from the walnuts. I too was sceptical about the idea of a low fat cheddar, but it really does deliver everything you'd want from a cheddar, without the horrible rubbery texture I normally associate with attempts at low fat cheese.

Next up was the extra mature Cornish Crackler, which is matured for 18-20 months. Mark described it as possessing a "flinty" texture, breaking up on a board like shrapnel when cut. This is because of its low moisture content. The reason for the name 'crackler' is that the cheese is studded with crunchy pieces of calcium lactate, a natural byproduct of the maturation process. Apparently this cheese "creeps up and mugs you in a nice, stylish kind of way": it's mature, but not overpoweringly so, and its flavour builds slowly, with a wonderful creamy aftertaste that is very moreish. I just loved the little bits of crunch, they were so unusual for a cheese. With this we drank Quinto do Crasto, a red wine made from the same grapes as port. The undisputed highlight of the evening was Nathan's recipe, an amazing smoked mackerel and Crackler quiche. I have never tasted such a beautiful quiche; the filling was so light and airy, but with a gorgeous depth of flavour from the mackerel - "my fish", as Nathan called it. I had two pieces of this quiche and am still fantasising about it. The recipe is here.

While I was still snaffling pieces of quiche, we moved on to three cheddars that are not commercially available - naturally, I was quite excited by this notion of exclusivity. Firstly, a three-year old cheddar that can only be found commercially at Nathan's restaurant; in fact, he graded it himself. Mark described it as "as flinty and rugged as the Cornish cliffs but as soft and smooth as the fields around it". He was right about its texture; it was very crumbly, breaking off in jagged shards. Like "native oysters", Nathan believes this cheese should stand alone rather than be used in cooking. The appearance of the cheese was very interesting; it was covered in a white bloom rather like chocolate that has been left out for too long. This is the calcium lactate that gives the Cornish Crackler its crunch. It was once considered a fault in cheesemaking; now it is highly prized and difficult to achieve, the sign of a great cheese. This cheese "envelopes you with a pleasant hug", as Mark said. It was reminiscent of parmesan in its strength, but had much more nuttiness to it. For this reason, Fiona partnered it with Barbadillo Amontillado Sherry, the sweetness and dried fruit aromas of which worked perfectly. 

Next came the four year old cheese, which Mark described as "moving the boundaries of what is possible in cheesemaking and keeping". Again, it was marbled with white calcium lactate. He suggested it has a dark chocolate quality to it, and I can see what he means: it has that intensity and strength and slight sweetness that you get from dark chocolate; the kind of intense burst of flavour that means you only want one piece rather than nine. We joked that this might be a better option for the Davidstow Lighter: it's so rich that you're guaranteed to eat less of it.



One of the qualities Davidstow pride themselves on is the creaminess of their cheese. Mark pointed out that when a lot of people think of very mature cheddar, they think of that mouth-puckering tartness that can be very unpleasant. This isn't the case with Davidstow, who see it as vital to create an identity that consumers buy into: they want people to buy Cornish cheddar because it is creamy and buttery, owing to the creaminess of the excellent milk produced in Cornwall. Good mature cheddar, Mark thinks, should produce a buttery feeling in the mouth, cause salivation, and taste almost juicy. By driving out moisture from the cheesemaking process you get a more stable product, but you lose those positive qualities.



Finally, a five year old cheese. This amazed me: it tasted like grilled cheese on toast. Somehow, in its raw form, it had a taste reminiscent of Welsh rarebit. I'm not sure why this is, or what part of the cheesemaking process gives it this flavour, but I immensely enjoyed it. I can't see how you'd want to do anything with this other than eat it and be astounded by the taste sensation. It is very strong, but not unpleasantly so, and has an incredible intensity of flavour and long-lasting aftertaste. We ate this with parma ham and bresaola; the cooked notes of the cheese matched perfectly with the saltiness of the meat. I can only imagine how it would taste in a rarebit.

This evening was a real eye- (and mouth-) opener for me. I had no idea about the complexities of cheesemaking; it had never really struck me that milk is such a variable product and therefore cheesemaking can be such an unstable process. Mark pointed out that people nowadays tend to have generally quite a good idea about wine, and how different vintages will differ in quality because of all sorts of factors involved in the winemaking process, yet they never apply those same principles to cheese. It's definitely changed the way I view cheese, and I'm now very keen to start experimenting more with different varieties in the kitchen. Starting, probably, with that incredible mackerel quiche. I'm especially eager to experiment after I came away from the event laden with Davidstow goodies, including a block of that oh-so-exclusive three-year old cheddar, and a beautiful slate cheeseboard (which had me in fits of excitement, because I'd been eyeing them covetously when the food was brought out on them during the evening).

A big thank you to Nathan, Mark and Fiona for such an interesting and enjoyable event, and to those who invited me; I feel very privileged to have been able to attend.

British Hen Welfare Trust: happy hens make for yummy yolks

I often think about what exactly it is that draws me to food and food writing. Obviously, there is the fact that I am a glutton, greedy to sample anything and everything that can possibly pass my lips on this planet of ours. There is also the creativity that comes with cooking; I've always loved all sorts of creative acts - drawing, painting, writing, music - and food is perhaps the most unselfish creative act there is, in that it brings not only happiness to people but also fulfils one of the most basic physical human needs. What makes me love not only cooking and eating food, but also reading and writing obsessively about it, is the way it is fundamentally and inextricably linked with so many other things. Just look at the way the credit crunch brought about a huge change in the way people cook and eat, the way Jamie Oliver started extolling the virtues of back-to-basics cooking in a way that made people think twice before reaching for the phone to dial an expensive takeaway. Or the way our concerns with environmental sustainability have impacted on food, prompting a huge rethink in the way we catch and consume fish. Or the way food is so closely bound up with national identity, yet at the same time crosses cultural boundaries like nothing else; it is often said that the British national dish is now curry, a fact certainly evident from the dishes that have made the final of Great British Menu recently: coronation chicken, Indian spiced sea bass, masala-spiced monkfish. Food is not just something to be eaten as fuel; it is bound up with a whole host of sociopolitical, economic, and ethical concerns. When you hear the words veal, cod, bluefin tuna, farmed salmon, you are no longer listening to a list of appetising things for dinner, but a collection that invokes a whole host of issues that go far beyond the plate.

The same is true of eggs and chicken. I'd like to think that most people in this country are at least partially aware of the horrors of battery farming, though I am frequently confronted with examples that prove that, sadly, this is not the case. A friend of mine remarked that he doesn't care where his chicken has come from, provided he gets to eat it. This kind of thing shocks and disgusts me. Hens are crammed into cages, often with less space per hen than a piece of A4 paper, allowing them no room to move freely or stretch their wings. This creates an increase in disease, cannibalism, and odd pecking behaviours caused by boredom and stress. If you want more horrible details about the conditions in which your chicken and eggs are produced, read here or here. Hideously, it is estimated at 60% of the world's eggs are produced in these conditions. It basically amounts to torture, and yet it's sanctioned and taking place all around us.

What really surprises me about people who buy battery eggs is that they're barely any cheaper than free-range. Surely for about 30p more per half dozen, you could get eggs that don't come with such a horrible ethical burden. When it comes to chicken for eating, free-range chickens are often a bit more expensive than the pallid, blue-tinged, shrink-wrapped specimens on the supermarket shelves, so naturally people are inclined towards those without sparing a thought for the conditions in which the chicken was raised. I firmly believe this is an issue of supply and demand. Because, as a culture, we are obsessed with the idea that a meal is not a meal unless it contains meat, we are driven to purchasing lower quality, less ethical meat simply to satisfy our own demand for the stuff. Personally I would rather go vegetarian for a few days each week, then save up and buy a really gorgeous free-range chicken to roast for lunch at the weekend. What's the point in filling meals with tasteless, chewy, battery-farmed chicken breast just for the sake of having some meat involved? I'd much rather have a chicken that tasted of something and that I treated with respect, making the most of it for its chicken-ness rather than to fill an animal-protein gap that culturally I have been made to believe exists.

I don't want this to sound like a lecture, and I know a lot of people can't afford free range chicken all the time. But the simple solution, to me, is to just eat less meat and buy better when you can. That doesn't sound so difficult to me. If we didn't all buy this horrible stuff, consumers would stop producing it. M&S and Waitrose no longer sell battery eggs, a fact that makes me happy, and other supermarkets like Sainsbury's are planning to phase out battery eggs. However, there is another problem: while you can go free-range when buying boxes of eggs from the shelf or a chicken from the meat counter, you have no way of telling where the eggs come from in a lot of products. Mayonnaise, for example, and ready-meals containing eggs, like quiche. 3 billion eggs go into these processed food products each year, a third of which are imported, and even if Britain did ban caged eggs altogether, there would be no clear way of identifying which eggs were free-range and which were imported from battery farms. Hellmans recently started selling a free-range mayonnaise, though, which I suppose is a step forward. The government plans to phase out battery farms totally by 2012, but there is a lot of contention as to whether this will actually happen. Especially because I read an article recently saying there was a plan to bring back battery rabbit farming. Why on earth, given all the controversy over battery chicken, would you actually take the active step of implementing further horrors on other animals?

As the old saying goes, which came first: the chicken or the egg? I believe it is a case of putting the chickens first, not the need for cheap eggs.

For most battery hens, their life will be a miserable journey from cage to slaughter, once they have passed their peak egg-laying potential. However, the British Hen Welfare Trust, set up in 2005, is a charity that aims to give ex-battery hens a new lease of life. Each year they save approximately 60,000 hens from slaughter by giving them to people to adopt as pets. The BHWT was actually responsible for bringing about the Hellman's free range mayonnaise, and aims to educate people about the horrors of battery farming and what they can do as consumers to make informed choices regarding egg-containing products. Most importantly, they turn battery hens into happy hens, giving them up for adoption by people who can provide space for the hens to roam. If you don't have space for your own hens, you can sponsor a hen for a small cost to guarantee it a better life. I am incredibly keen to have my own hens at some point - you really can't beat fresh eggs, and it's not always apparent, but supermarket eggs may have been lying around for weeks before sale. I remember staying in Italy on a farm in Perugia a few summers ago, and eating eggs still warm from the chickens for breakfast. They're not only tastier, but also better for a variety of culinary usages - it's well known that only fresh eggs will poach properly.

My friend Laura recently adopted some ex-battery hens from the Trust, and I was lucky enough to be given some of their eggs to sample. I thought they were delicious; much more flavoursome than supermarket eggs. Laura tells me that now the hens have been out of the battery farm for a bit longer, the eggs are even better (I look forward to receiving another batch). The hens were a bit scrawny and decrepit-looking when she first got them, but she tells me that she has noticed "such a difference in their perkiness and featheriness already". You can see some photos here of the happy hens (Eliza, Matilda, Jennifer and Prudence), freed from their hideous prisons. I imagine it must be immensely satisfying to watch their journey from traumatised, brutalised animal into freely roaming, happy outdoor hen. It's a mutually beneficial relationship, too: happiness for the hens, and yummy eggs for the human. It also just goes to show that, despite a large part of their lives being spent in such traumatic conditions, a hen is not a worthless creature to be discarded afterwards. They are susceptible to habilitation, and I think it's great that charities like the British Hen Welfare Trust are working to achieve this. To transform a hen from a scraggy, tormented thing to a proud and splendid animal is something I envy all ex-battery hen-adopters.

So if you're reading this, I hope you'll consider changing your egg and chicken-buying habits if you haven't already. Think of poor Eliza, Matilda, Jennifer and Prudence. And if you are considering getting hens, definitely have a look at the BHWT's website - there's loads of useful information on there about getting your hens (they're free, but they suggest a small donation to help maintain the charity), caring for them, recommended vets, etc. There's also a lot of information about British free-range chicken farmers and the need for an educated, egg-wise consumer.

And, below - what better way to eat delicious, free-range, fresh eggs than poached on toast with a generous helping of smoked salmon? Guilt-free indulgence. Thank you Laura!

Peach and redcurrant cheesecake

You know that classic saying, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade?" I would like to propose a new version: "When your moronic housemate leaves the freezer open all night, defrosting that beautiful punnet of redcurrants you bought at the farmers' market months ago and were saving for a very special dessert, calm the boiling torrent of rage threatening to engulf your very being and spur you on to unsavoury actions involving placing him inside a large block of ice from which there is no escape, and make redcurrant cheesecake". Unfortunately, I'm not sure it's a pithy enough aphorism to catch on. 

This cheesecake might, however. I am always one for looking on the bright side of life, and decided that instead of risking jail for murder, I would instead be glad that I had the opportunity to come up with a culinary use for these redcurrants. I'd always been planning to pair them with peaches, probably in a delicate and elegant French-style tart with pastry cream. However, there was one tiny issue with this: I'd also had a bag of egg whites in the freezer (I am a serial hoarder of egg whites - like a mad bag lady, just with bags containing jelloid chicken amniotic fluid, which - by the way - gains a rather creepy, alien-esque green tint to it the more you put in the bag). The egg whites somehow leaked all over the redcurrants - "zip-lock" bags clearly neither zip nor lock - and so I didn't want to use them raw just in case they were contaminated. They probably weren't. But I don't like the idea of giving my friends food poisoning. They would stop coming round for dinner and then I would have no purpose in life and would probably just cease to exist, disappearing without trace save for a freezer loaded with bags of egg whites.

On my list, then, of desserts involving cooked redcurrants were a peach and redcurrant crumble, a peach and redcurrant cake, and a peach and redcurrant cheesecake. The cake I had in mind would have been very similar to last week's Czech bubble cake, so I thought I'd try something different. The reason I decided on cheesecake over crumble is almost entirely aesthetic: cheesecakes look better in photographs. Tragic, I know. I've reached that awful food blogging stage where the photos are more important than the flavour. (Though they're not, really, because cheesecake and crumble are my two favourite desserts and either would have tasted great).

I make a lot of cheesecakes. To the point where now I don't even need a recipe; I can just go to the supermarket, buy some random dairy products and then combine them in a bowl to make something vaguely edible. This time I went a bit mad with experimentation and ventured into the 'Polish dairy' section of Tesco. I found curd cheese, something I had read Delia raving about for cheesecakes, and also peach-flavoured fromage frais. I wanted fromage frais for the cheesecake as a substitute for the creme fraiche I normally use, but couldn't find the unadulterated stuff. I figured peach would be perfect: all the peach flavour was there already - I was planning on topping the cheesecake with sliced peaches, but an extra layer of peachy goodness couldn't hurt.

Actually, it did hurt. I clearly forgot, in my haze of Polish dairy-related excitement, that I loathe yoghurt and all its manifestations. I told myself that fromage frais is a bit different - it has 'fromage' in the title therefore is really closer to cheese - which I love - than yoghurt - which I loathe to the point where, if I ever need to make myself sick, I just have to put my head inside a suitable receptacle and imagine eating a tub of yoghurt with a spoon. Unfortunately, one of the things I hate most about yoghurt is the artificial flavours you get, and as soon as I opened the peach fromage frais my gag reflex was fully deployed. Undeterred, I put it in the cheesecake anyway, sure that its artificial flavour would mellow out once it was cooked.

Ahem. It didn't. Instead it filled my entire house with the aroma of baking peach-flavoured yoghurt. However, I was still convinced that this hideous sweetness would be offset by the tart currants, so all would be well. The rest of the cheesecake mixture comprised eggs, curd cheese (rather like ricotta but much more dense and crumbly), sugar, a little vanilla extract and a squeeze of honey, along with the redcurrants. It looked beautiful when I took it out of the oven. Or, actually, a bit sinister, like a heavily bloodstained sheet. Having spent the morning in the library reading about bloody beds in Arthurian literature for my dissertation, redcurrant cheesecake may, in retrospect, not have been the best option for dessert.

I was going, as I said, to slice some peaches and layer them over the top. However, I thought the cake looked so nice with its splatters of bright red currants that it would be a shame to cover it up. Instead, I baked some peaches in foil with a splash of sherry and some honey until they turned soft and unctuous. This was a good idea, given the peaches were rock hard, as I expected they would be. Once cooked, however, they turned into fairly satisfactory specimens, and I served them alongside wedges of the cheesecake with a little of their juices drizzled over.

I'd like to try making this cheesecake again. The curd cheese was a bit too crumbly, it turns out. I think I'd go back to using ricotta or cream cheese, because the cake was slightly drier than I would have liked. However, the crumbliness did go really well with the tart juicy burst of the currants. The only issue was the peach flavoured yoghurt; plain fromage frais would have been better, because that faux-peach flavour really was quite overpowering. However, I think that is just my personal preference based on my hatred of yoghurt, because the others who ate the cake said it was really nice. The crumbly cake with the soft peaches is a nice texture contrast, though if the peaches were ripe I would probably have just chopped them and sprinkled them over the surface of the cooked cake. Definitely one to try and improve on, but as it is, pretty tasty. And not bad for an improvisation borne of a cold-storage-related catastrophe.

Peach and redcurrant cheesecake (makes one 18cm cake):

300g cream cheese or ricotta

100g caster sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tbsp honey

2 eggs

150ml creme fraiche or plain fromage frais (use peach if you like the fake flavour...)

One punnet of redcurrants (or raspberries)

Peaches, to serve

Pre-heat the oven to 170C. Beat together the cheese, sugar, vanilla, eggs, honey and creme fraiche/fromage frais. Fold in two thirds of the redcurrants and spoon into a greased and lined 18cm springform cake tin. Scatter the remaining redcurrants over the top.

Bake for 55 minutes or so until just about set all the way through - the inside should still wobble a little. If it is browning too much after half an hour, cover with foil for the rest of the cooking time.

Remove and leave to cool. Dust with icing sugar to decorate. If your peaches are ripe, simply scatter them, chopped, over the top of the cake. If not, halve them, wrap in a foil parcel with a splash of sherry or white wine and a drizzle of honey, and bake until tender, then serve alongside the cake.

Herrings, pomegranate, tahini

It's almost an empty phrase to say that a food combination "just works"; what does that even mean? Lots of things work, food-wise, but every now and then you come across a pairing of ingredients that leaps out at you. At a restaurant a while ago I tried a dish of chicken pâté with toast and a quince chutney. I'm no stranger to the combination of meat and fruit, but this was the first occasion on which it had tasted absolutely perfect to me. Normally I just enjoy fruit and meat because it involves two things I like; in this case, the two became more than just the sum of their parts; you could barely distinguish in that exquisite mouthful where fruit ended and meat began. Every now and then I come up with a recipe that pleasantly surprises me, when things I hoped might taste nice together in my head work out better than I thought. This is one of them.

It's also surprising because it involved something I've never cooked before: herring. I went to the fishmonger intending to buy tilapia for a tikka-marinated fish dish, but saw these beautiful glistening herrings lined up on the ice. I can never resist something new, so I bought three (and, incidentally, was taken aback by how cheap they were). I read a recipe in the Telegraph recently for roast herring with tahini sauce and freekeh, which is a type of grain that I've never had any luck finding. Undeterred, I figured I'd just make a variation of it using things I had in the cupboard/fridge. Apart from spinach, I had everything for this dish sitting around in the kitchen. This hardly ever happens, and I relished not having to tear manically around the markets for some obscure ingredient that would prove vital.

I love tahini. It's the sesame seed paste they use to make hoummous, which gives it that deliciously moreish, silky quality. I've used it before in a few Middle Eastern recipes, usually mixed with yoghurt, water and lemon juice to make an absolutely sublime sauce. In this case I did the same, crushing a clove of smoked garlic into it too. The result was a little like hoummous in flavour but much stronger and more tangy. I can't recommend this sauce enough; it goes beautifully with so many things. It's ideal as a replacement for yoghurt alongside rice pilaffs or spiced lamb, but also goes very well with fish and roasted vegetables.

Instead of the freekeh and Swiss chard in the original recipe, I used bulghur wheat, mixed with cinnamon, allspice, salt and pepper. I pan-fried some chopped spinach (huge leafy bunches of the proper stuff, not the clinically packaged, uniform baby leaves you find in the supermarket), stirred it in, and finally mixed in some pomegranate seeds. I'm not sure why; I think it was probably a knee-jerk reaction to the tahini, bulghur and allspice pairing. I also love the glistening, jewel-like appearance of a scattering of pomegranate seeds. They perk up any dish, both in appearance and in flavour.

Finally, the herring, which I just roasted in the oven for about 15 minutes. I anticipated it would taste like mackerel; in fact, I couldn't really distinguish the two, and either would make a good substitute for the other. Sardines would work too. In fact, I think in future I'd choose mackerel, simply because herring seems to have so many more fiddly little bones to deal with. The result was one of the best things I've cooked in a while, and it's so simple. The bulghur, spinach and pomegranate is great on its own and I could eat platefuls of it. However, when you mix in the tahini sauce it adds another layer of intriguing flavour and also moisture. Finally, add the succulent flakes of rich, oily fish, given the welcoming sweet burst of the pomegranate seeds, and you have something superb. Really. It just works.

Roast herring with bulghur and tahini sauce (serves 4):

• 4 large herring (or mackerel), gutted and cleaned
• 2 tbsp tahini
• 4 tbsp yoghurt
• Juice of one lemon
• 1 garlic clove
• 200g bulghur wheat, soaked in boiling water for 30 minutes and drained
• Two large bunches of spinach (or one large bag)
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• Seeds of half a pomegranate
• 1/2 tsp each cinnamon and allspice
• Salt and black pepper

Pre-heat the oven to 180C.

Crush the garlic with a pinch of salt in a pestle and mortar. Add the tahini and mix well, then add the lemon juice and yoghurt. Stir and mix to form a fairly runny sauce.

Roughly chop the spinach - if using a bunch you can use the stalks too if you chop them fairly finely. Heat the oil in a pan and sauté the spinach until it has wilted. Stir this into the bulghur, then add the cinnamon, allspice, pomegranate seeds and a generous amount of salt and pepper - taste to check the balance is right.

Lay the herrings on a sheet of foil on an oven tray and roast for about 15 minutes - they're ready when the flesh is opaque. Serve the herring on top of the bulghur with the tahini sauce poured on top and lemon wedges for squeezing over.

Apricot and almond French toast

If you are a regular reader of this blog (and if you're not, explanations in writing please - there's a comment button at the bottom of this post), you will know that I have a strange and passionate fetish for apricots. Fresh ones, mainly, though I love to use the dried ones in all sorts of dishes, particularly savoury ones. Few things make me happier, culinarily speaking, than when the first of the season's apricots appear at the market. I feel reassured that for the next few months I will never be lacking in ideas for luscious, apricot-related confections. I read an old Telegraph article today - I think it was about berries - that at the bottom was asking people to send in apricot recipes for potential publication. Unfortunately it was dated 2001; I was devastated when I read the date, because I feel I am just the girl they need. It could have been my much-needed big break in the food-writing world. One glimpse of this apricot French toast, and I guarantee they would have hired me to extol the wonders of this gorgeous fruit. Preferably for a substantial salary. Though I could deal with being paid simply in crates of apricots.

It occurred to me, while lying in bed the other day, that perhaps my obsession with apricots is largely the result of subliminal messaging. I sleep with a large art print of a bowl of apricots directly in front of my bed; it is the first thing I see when I wake up, and the last thing my sleepy eyes focus on before they close for eight hours. I never really thought about the connection before. I love apricots for their beautiful colouring - particularly when you find some with a bright red blush blossoming over their usual orange - and for their versatility in the kitchen. I love them because they can appear fairly unassuming when raw, then, given the heat treatment, soften and transform into fragrant, pleasantly tart morsels of sunshine. I love them because they feature in lots of Moroccan and Middle Eastern recipes, my favourite type of cuisine. But maybe none of that is true. Maybe I just love them because they sit there on my wall staring at me all night, sending their little orange vibes into my sleeping brain, begging me to continue my love affair with them and bring ways of cooking them to the world.

So, not one to let the apricots down, here is a simple but fantastically delicious recipe. It's a brunch dish in my mind, but could also be a dessert if you've had a light main course and use a little less bread. Obviously, French toast is not my invention (for starters, I am not French, nor do I eat toast that often). However, this combination arose as yet another way to bring my favourite fruit to the breakfast table, and it's now one of my favourites. It's essentially the same method as my rhubarb and vanilla French toast, but I made a couple of changes. I used wholemeal bread instead of white, mainly for health-conscious reasons but also because I love the more interesting flavour (more interesting, because manufactured white bread tastes mainly of cotton wool with a slight notes of albino and undertones of cloud). I used almond extract instead of vanilla (I can't get enough of this stuff at the moment), and I served it with apricots instead of rhubarb.

Not just any apricots, though. These were cooked in a way I've never tried before, and were definitely the best I've ever made. After my trout-in-a-parcel antics the other day, I decided to try baking the apricots in a foil parcel. I drizzled a little honey over the halved fruit, added a splash of orange flower water, sealed the parcel and put it in the oven. Oh, my goodness. They were amazing. Their colour intensified to this incredible marigold, and they softened into the most flavour-packed apricots I've ever had. My boyfriend, who sampled this, remarked that they tasted like apricot jam. You get all of that concentrated flavour and tartness, but without having to add any sugar or do very much at all. They also keep their shape better than in a compote, so look beautiful too. Unfortunately a lot of the sugary juices bubbled out of the parcel and solidified on the oven floor, but if you plan in advance and place the foil parcel on a tray, you can then drizzle the juices over the French toast when you serve it.

It's hard to convey how good this is. I sprinkled demerara sugar on the bread just before frying it, resulting in this amazing caramelised crust, while the inside of the bread stays gooey from the egg. The almond extract isn't too overpowering, but works so well with the sweet, tart fruit, soft enough to squish onto each mouthful of bread as you eat it. Even better, the bread soaks up all the fragrant juices from the apricots. I'm glad I used wholemeal; it has much more depth of flavour and also a bit more texture, somehow, than white, so is better for standing up to the apricots and almond. I genuinely can't think of a better brunch.

Lord knows why I'm writing this on an empty stomach. I'm such a masochist.

Apricot and almond French toast (serves 2):

• 6 large apricots (you could also use peaches), halved
• 2 tbsp honey
• 1 tsp orange flower water
• 4 thick slices wholemeal bread, cut from an unsliced loaf and left out overnight to harden
• 2 eggs
• 200ml whole milk
• 1/2 tsp almond extract
• Demerara sugar, for sprinkling
• A knob of butter
• Icing sugar, for dusting

Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Place the apricots on a large sheet of foil, and bring the sides up to form a parcel. Drizzle over the honey and flower water, then seal the parcel and place on a baking tray. Cook in the oven for about half an hour, or until the apricots are soft and fragrant. Check them halfway through - you don't want them to collapse into mush - just remember to re-seal the parcel.

When the apricots are nearly done, whisk the eggs, milk and almond extract together in a baking dish. Lay the slices of bread in the mixture for 5-10 minutes, then flip over. You want them to have absorbed most of the milk. Make sure there are no dry patches by pressing it down into the milk.

Heat the butter in a frying pan until foaming. Sprinkle the bread slices with the demerara sugar then place, sugar-side down, in the butter - you may need to do this in batches. It should sizzle. While that side is cooking, sprinkle sugar on the other side. Cook for about 4 minutes before flipping over and cooking the other side. You should have a crunchy, caramelised crust and a soft interior (the toast, I mean - not you yourself).

Remove the apricots from the oven and turn it down to 90C or so. Keep the cooked toast in the oven to keep it warm while you make the second batch. I find this helps to remove any excess moisture as well, so you could always put both batches in there to cook through when you're done.

Sprinkle the French toast with icing sugar and serve with the cooked apricots and a drizzle of their juice. A scattering of toasted almonds would be good too.

Veal saltimbocca

I was forced into making this meal by my absolute cretin of a housemate who left the freezer door open all night, resulting in a lot of my prized, hoarded and expensive ingredients turning into a pile of bacteria-riddled mush. If you can sense a deep underlying streak of sheer rage in the previous sentence, you would be correct. I won't, however, bore you with an account of how I'd like to inflict upon him a slow and agonising death involving frostbite and salmonella. Instead, I will look on the bright side: I had to find a quick use for a packet of veal rump steak that had completely thawed into supple, cookable goodness.

I bought this veal from Bocaddon Farm at the Real Food Festival. I've had their veal before and it's always delicious; it's a treat I rarely allow myself, as it's pretty expensive at the butchers lately, but Bocaddon had a lot of offers on at the festival, so I traipsed home laden with sausages, burgers, a roasting joint and this steak. It's ethical veal, not the hideous anaemic stuff you get in Europe, so it's both delicious and welfare-friendly. The steak tastes quite like beef, but much milder, and its colour is closer to pork.

Initially I was going to sear the steaks and serve them with a creamy mushroom sauce, but then I remembered the Italian classic dish, saltimbocca. I love the name of this dish: it literally means 'jumps in the mouth'. And it really does: the combination of parma ham, veal and fried sage, cooked in marsala, is a salty, meaty, slightly sweet marriage made in heaven. The Italians do wonderful things with sage, far more interesting than the Christmas pork stuffing which is about as far as we Brits go. One of the best things I've ever eaten was a plate of meat-filled casoncelli pasta in a trattoria in Bergamo, served with a simple sage butter sauce. In Ferrara I had the same sauce over a plate of pumpkin-stuffed ravioli. The combination of sage and butter over meaty or sweet pumpkin pasta is utterly divine.

This dish is one of the easiest I've ever made. I also love how it has such Italian colours: the white and red of the parma ham with the green of the sage leaves is like a little Italian flag on your plate. I wrapped the veal steaks in parma ham, enclosing a few sage leaves, seasoned them, and pan-fried them to rare. I kept them warm while I deglazed the pan with sherry (marsala is way too expensive for my student budget), added a little arrowroot to thicken the sauce, and then served them on a pile of polenta, with sautéed mushrooms and green beans. The parma ham makes the steaks quite salty, but it's balanced out by the perfume of the sage leaves and then the very sweet sherry sauce. Satisfying and delicious. Not bad for something that arose from an act of selfish appliance-related ineptitude. Apparently writing this blog post did not prove cathartic enough - the anger is still there.

Veal saltimbocca (serves 2):

• 2 veal steaks
• 2-4 slices parma ham
• Sage leaves
• Salt and pepper
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 200ml sherry or marsala
• 1 tsp arrowroot or cornflour mixed with 1 tsp cold water
• Polenta and vegetables, to serve

Lay a few sage leaves over the veal steaks. Season. Wrap one or two slices of parma ham around each steak to enclose the leaves.

Heat the oil in a frying pan until smoking. Add the steaks; cook for a couple of minutes on each side (or longer, depending on how cooked you like your meat and how thick your steaks are). Remove to a plate and cover with foil to rest while you make the sauce.

Throw a sprig of sage into the pan. Pour the sherry into the hot pan and stir to deglaze. Let it bubble for a minute or so, then stir in the arrowroot mixture to thicken the sauce. Taste and check the seasoning; it should be quite sweet. Pour over the veal steaks, and serve with polenta or mash, and your choice of vegetables.

Bublanina (Czech bubble cake)

One of my favourite things about being fairly adept at cooking is the fact that I am able to recreate dishes I've tasted. While some people's memories of an amazing cake or meal they've eaten abroad remain exactly that - memories - I am quite thrilled by the fact that my obsession with culinary experimentation means that I am often able to at least come close to recreating something delicious I've eaten in a far-flung country, or at a nice restaurant. Of course, holiday eating I find often relies mainly on the context; obviously mussels will taste better if eaten in the glorious sunshine beside the sea in the south of France, but sometimes evoking those memories through taste can be a satisfying experience in itself. This was definitely the case when I set out to replicate bublanina, a Czech confection that - I think - translates as 'bubble cake' because of the way the batter bubbles up around the fruit.

My recent trip to Prague involved all sorts of excellent - and expensive - eating, but, as is so often the case with food abroad, most of my favourite things were obtained from stalls in the Easter market. From the stomach-stretching carbohydrate-overload of the gnocchi with bacon and sauerkraut, to the sheer divine goodness of TRDLO, Prague's market had more than enough to keep me gastronomically satisfied for the duration of the trip. One of the highlights was the bubble cake, which initially I thought was a mini blueberry crumble in a paper case:

I have vivid memories of eating this cake, standing up at a small wooden table perched outside the stall that sold it, plastic fork in hand, boyfriend taking photos of me eating (which normally would irk me, but I was far too absorbed in consuming baked sustenance to notice). I've mentioned it several times now, but the main revelation of this cake was that it had strawberries in. That's right. Cooked strawberries. Until that day, the notion of cooking strawberries was to my food-literature-influenced mind as heinous as serving a fillet steak well-done, or buying battery eggs. I was assured, vehemently, by all sorts of influential culinary personae that it is just not done. I remember the tragic moment on the Great British Bake-Off where one of my favourite contestants made the grave and fatal error of attempting to put a layer of strawberries in his steamed pudding. They collapsed into a sad puddle of despair, as did his dreams of winning the contest. Mary Berry's watchful eye took in every last disintegrated berry with scorn and repugnance.

They are wrong. A revelation, I know. I am breaking all the boundaries of food writing and cookery here, but I am proud to do so, because these cooked strawberries were just so good. They had somewhat disintegrated into the cake batter to leave a moist, jammy sensation, which provided a glorious burst of sweetness. The cake contained other fruits - blueberries and plums were its main components - which had held their shape better, so the strawberries just provided a delicious contrast, particularly because they were sweeter than the other fruits.

It's sad, perhaps, and a sign of how obsessed with food I am, but that cake really did make its mark on my mind, and it was as if a whole world of culinary possibilities opened up, all revolving around the humble strawberry. A week or so later, I tried sliced strawberries in pancake batter. The same thing happened: they turned jammy, sweet and delicious. For the last few weeks, I've been itching to try and recreate the bubble cake, complete with controversial strawberries.

Finally, I got round to it. I looked up a few Czech recipes online, and in the end decided to follow none of them, mainly because they all seemed to suggest making a normal sponge cake and just putting berries on the top. The one I ate in Prague didn't have that sponginess to it; I'm pretty sure the cake mixture was more of a batter, with less butter and more of something like milk. In the end, I decided just to try making a similar batter, using yoghurt instead of milk to thicken it. I did use a bit of butter, made light and fluffy by whisking it with brown sugar and eggs, then added flour and enough yoghurt to form almost a dough. I also added a bit of almond extract, which was a stroke of genius (even if I say so myself). I was torn between almond and vanilla, but I think almond with berries is just wonderful, and it reminds me of bakewell tart.

For the fruit on top, obviously the strawberries were first in there. I also used blueberries, which were definitely in the cake in Prague, as were plums - I used four, thinly sliced - and then I added some cherries too, mainly because I can't resist their gorgeous shiny skins in the market and keep buying loads. I've also just bought a cherry pitter, and I can say completely truthfully that the highlight of that day was using it for the first time. Note to self: wear an apron next time.

Fruit hulled/pitted/sliced, I just scattered it over the top of the batter in the cake tin. The name 'bubble cake', I think, comes from the fact that the batter sort of bubbles up around the fruit as it cooks. I could have put some fruit into the batter itself, but decided to just leave it on top, so I'd get a lovely layer of juicy berries balanced by a light pillow of sponge.

A little while in the oven later - longer than I thought, because the fruit released a lot of juice which kept the top of the cake moist and prevented it cooking through easily - my bubble cake emerged. It looked perfect; the fruit had cooked but still held its shape, and the batter had risen up and cooked. In fact, it looked just like a larger version of the little cake I had eaten in Prague at that wooden table. I let it cool for a bit, dusted it with icing sugar, and dived in - this time with a metal spoon, not a plastic fork.

As I think I've said before, the problem with blogging about things I've cooked is that they're always nice (otherwise I wouldn't share them with you - believe me, there have been a few failures). Therefore it's hard to get across quite how good something is without using obvious words like delicious, divine, sublime, excellent, etc. However, I can truly say that this is perhaps the best cake I have ever made. I'm so proud of it, especially because I just came up with the recipe and really doubted it would match Prague's version. I think it might even be better - but this is probably because I ate mine fresh from the oven and served with a big scoop of chocolate ice cream.

How to convey its brilliance? Difficult, really. The cake is incredibly light and moist; it almost melts in the mouth, and leaves a very slight hint of almond that somehow makes it sweeter. The berries are tart, a perfect contrast, and the layer where sponge meets berry is the absolute pinnacle of deliciousness; sweet, sticky, juicy. It's not too heavy a dessert to eat after a big meal, either. In fact, it's everything I want from a dessert: the satisfying stodginess of sponge, the sweet tartness of fruit, and the option of serving it with ice cream. I made chocolate ice cream to go with it, but vanilla would be perfect. Vanilla custard, clotted cream, creme fraiche or chocolate sauce would all go brilliantly too. The beauty of this cake is its versatility. You could make it with pretty much any fruit - apricots would be divine, as would figs or raspberries. I can't wait to make it again.

Czech bubble cake (serves 8):

• 150g light muscovado sugar
• 50g softened butter
• 2 eggs
• 200g plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• Yoghurt - about 200ml
• 1/2 tsp almond essence (or vanilla extract)
• A pinch of salt
• Fruit for the topping - I used a large handful each of plums, cherries, strawberries and blueberries

Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Mix the butter and sugar together with an electric whisk until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well in between. Sift in the flour and baking powder, almond essence, and the pinch of salt, then mix well. Finally, add enough yoghurt to create quite a thick dough, almost as thick as bread dough. You want it to support the fruit when you scatter it on top.

Pour the batter into a greased and lined 22cm springform cake tin.

Prepare the fruit - slice the plums, stone the cherries, halve the strawberries, etc. Press about two thirds of the fruit into the top of the batter. Scatter the rest over the top.

Bake for 40 minutes, or until the batter has cooked through and is firm to the touch. Allow to cool a little before serving with your choice of accompaniment - or just as it is.

Raspberry and white chocolate cheesecake

Bank holiday weekend means baking. Fortunately, I've been sent some recipes to test by Baking Mad. With a selection including cupcakes, biscuits and even a cupcake wedding cake to choose from, I had a hard time selecting this cheesecake (particularly as I was sent recipes for two others, including a Tia Maria version). However, it's one of the most successful and delicious cheesecakes I've ever baked, so I'm glad I tried it out, and I now get to share it with all of you. You can scroll down for the rest of the recipes, but be sure to ogle the photos of this gorgeous dessert on the way.

This cake owes its deliciousness, I think, to its chocolate biscuit base. The recipe suggests using a mixture of digestive biscuits, blitzed in a blender, and Silver Spoon dark chocolate drops. I improvised by blending a packet of chocolate digestives into crumbs, stirring in oodles of melted butter, and spreading it onto the base of a tin. As I did so I told my boyfriend about my rather disgusting adolescent habit of mixing up a cheesecake base mixture - digestive crumbs and melted butter - and then refraining from actually making the cheesecake, instead choosing to sit in front of the TV and eat the lot. Needless to say, I was a lot fatter then than I am now, though as I stirred the melted butter into those crumbs I had to fight an urge to just spoon the whole bowl into my mouth.

I deviated from the recipe slightly in that I baked the base before adding the filling. I always think that, unless you do this, you end up with a soggy biscuit base. Crisping it in the oven while it's heating up to bake the cheesecake is the perfect solution, resulting in a nice crunch that is a pleasant contrast to the creamy filling. You don't really need to do this with gelatin-based set cheesecakes, but I do think it's an important step when making the baked variety. Plus, the smell of buttery biscuit emanating from your oven is worth it.

The cheesecake filling is a simple mixture of eggs, cream cheese and creme fraiche, but instead of using sugar to sweeten it, the recipe suggests melting a bar of Silver Spoon white chocolate cake covering and stirring it in. I reckon you could also just use normal white chocolate. Because there's no extra sugar added to the cake, it isn't quite as sweet as you might expect. I think this is a positive thing - it has the slight tang of the classic New York baked cheesecake, and the sweetness of the chocolate base is more than enough for the filling. However, if you have quite a sweet tooth, I'd suggest adding a bit more sugar - maybe about 50g.

Also, the cheese mixture is studded with fresh raspberries before baking, and swirled through with raspberry coulis (the recipe tells you how to make your own from fresh raspberries, but I cheated and bought some ready-made stuff because I didn't have enough berries). The juicy berries contrast perfectly with the crumbly filling, and I love the look of the white cake rippled with pale pink coulis - it reminds me of those funny ice cream and raspberry desserts we used to have for school dinners, that came in a little pot and consisted of (no doubt cheap, processed) vanilla ice cream with a perfectly formed pink swirl through it. Does anyone know what I mean? Do these things actually have a name? I remember them very vividly from my childhood. Not that I ate them; I was a very fussy eater (would you believe it now?)

After baking for about an hour, the cheesecake needs to chill in the fridge for a bit, though I think it's best served just below room temperature - too cold and you can't appreciate all the different flavours and textures. The recipe suggests decorating with fresh raspberries, but I used them all in the cake so I went for strawberries. Either would be excellent, though I think strawberries are actually slightly better, because they have a juicy sweetness that complements the rather un-sweet, dense filling, whereas raspberries can be quite tart and I'm not sure there's enough sugar in the whole cake to balance it out.

This is a superb recipe, my minor tweaks aside. It's also very simple to make but looks like you've spent hours on it. Because there's no cream in the filling, it's a fairly light dessert option, particularly if you use low fat cream cheese and half fat creme fraiche, which I did, and it still tasted wonderful. It would be excellent with some extra raspberry coulis.

White Chocolate and Raspberry Cheesecake (serves 8-10):

For the base:

• 225g digestive biscuits
• 100g unsalted butter
• 50g Silver Spoon Cakecraft dark chocolate drops

For the filling:

• 450g soft cream cheese
• 4 large free-range eggs
• 1 tsp Silver Spoon Cakecraft Natural Vanilla essence
• 225g crème fraîche
• 225g Silver Spoon Cakecraft White Chocolate Flavour Cake
• Covering
• butter, for greasing
• Raspberry coulis:
• 300g fresh raspberries
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 100g Billington’s Unrefined Golden Caster sugar
• ½ tsp raspberry liqueur (optional)

For the coulis: Place half the raspberries in a microwaveable bowl and cook for 1 minute. Crush them with a fork and then pass the liquid through a fine sieve to remove the seeds.

Place the raspberry juice, sugar and lemon juice into a small saucepan and bring to the boil, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Reduce to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes until syrupy.

Remove from the heat and stir in the raspberry liquor if using. Allow to cool and thicken before using.

Place the digestives in a food processor and process into crumbs. Melt the butter over a low heat and mix in the biscuit crumbs and chocolate drops. Lightly grease a 25cm loose-bottomed cake tin and press the crumbs into the base.

Beat the cream cheese in a bowl until soft and smooth. Add the eggs one by one with the vanilla essence. Fold in the crème fraîche.

Melt the white chocolate in a bowl set over a pan of gently simmering water. Remove from the water and beat until a little cooler. Add to the cream cheese mix and fold in gently. If the chocolate becomes a little lumpy do not worry.

Sprinkle the remaining raspberries over the chilled base of the cheesecake. Pour the chocolate and cream cheese mixture into the tin and bang down on a firm surface to remove any air bubbles. Drizzle the raspberry coulis onto the cheesecake mix and swirl using the tip of a knife to give a marble effect.

Bake in a low oven, 150°C/fan oven 130°C, 300°F/Gas 2, for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until the centre is just firm.

Allow to rest for several hours to firm up. When ready to serve use a warm palate knife to release the cheesecake form the tin, before turning out the cake and serving topped with fresh raspberries.

Should you fancy making the Tia Maria or the lemon and ginger version, the recipes are

here

at Baking Mad. Here's a little preview of how theirs look. Their raspberry and white chocolate one is a little neater around the edges than mine - I think all the butter I used to grease the pan turned it that interesting 'caramelised' colour! It still tasted brilliant though.

You might also like to try the recipes for these gorgeous little

Union Jack cupcakes

, if you're still feeling full of patriotic fervour after the Royal Wedding.