Travel tips-Restaurant reviews-Recipes
Making a Dundee Cake is a risky business for me; fraught with the potential for family discord. It’s part of family history that I used to make Delia Smith’s Whisky Dundee Cake (in her Christmas book from 1990) for my son often when I visited him at university in Manchester or made one for him […]
Read MoreA family lunch for my brother and his family to meet Baby Gale had to be postponed for a month. The original Greek lunch plan turned into an Italian lunch plan. I’m still in Italian mode after the days in Venice this past week; there was a semifreddo already prepared and waiting in my freezer; […]
Read More‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ goes the old English proverb. Well, of course, I didn’t invent semifreddo but my venture into making one came because I still haven’t got round to buying a new ice-cream maker. I lent my old one to my daughter at Christmas when she wanted to make a clementine sorbet for […]
Read MoreMy recent trip to Amsterdam began with pancakes for lunch. I arrived at midday, checked into my hotel and then headed up to the area I know and like the best in the Jordaan district near Westerkerk and the Anne Frank house. It was so much quieter at the end of January than it had […]
Read More‘Muffin’ has become something of a generic word for small cakes. Once it was used only for those light, fluffy small cakes that contain a lot of air but now it’s more or less used for any individual cake cooked in a muffin-sized tin – larger than a fairy cake but definitely for a single serving. […]
Read MoreThere is a family story about Dundee cake. I took to making Scottish Whisky Dundee Cake for Christmas from Delia Smith’s Christmas book way back when it was first published in 1990 and my kids were still quite small. No one in the family – other than me – likes ‘proper’ Christmas cake: a rich, dark […]
Read MoreI’ve been on a bit of a roll with mulled wine this week while coming up with the Single Gourmet Traveller’s Mulled Wine Recipe for Waitrose Cellar. Amongst the six bottles of wine Waitrose sent me, I found a bottle of their own, ready-made Mulled Wine that comes in one neat bottle and needs no […]
Read MoreI was a voracious reader as a child. I remember when, aged 8, I was ill in bed with mumps, my mother was severely challenged by my relentless demand for books. I would get through two or three a day: books like The Secret Garden, the Heidi books, the Jennings series and What Katy Did. Books I came […]
Read MoreIt’s a rare thing for me to make a dessert for myself when I’m eating alone. Especially one that is so wonderfully indulgent. It came into being by a roundabout route, as these things often do. I’m looking after Jonathan and Lyndsey’s dog, Zeph, for the weekend as they’ve gone to a wedding in Somerset. […]
Read MoreThere really is nothing more summery than a bowl of English strawberries over which you’ve poured some fresh cream. Sadly, strawberries are one of those foods that are becoming readily available out of season, flown in from afar, and stacked on our supermarket shelves as if they in themselves might bring a taste of summer; but really, […]
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