Daffodil Soup London

Everyone secretly believes they would be the kind of person who would bake their own bread … if only, if only, if only. Bought bread is such a convenience, and so cheap. I spent decades freezing sliced loaves of Hovis Granary and popping them in the toaster as required. But, in the same way that vegetarians lose the memory of what meat tastes like, and decaf drinkers kid themselves that it tastes like the real thing, bulk produced, accelerated yeast improvers and the Chorley method don’t lie: once you’ve made your own bread at home there is no going back. By comparison supermarket loaves taste gluey and bland, and they sit in one’s stomach long after eating, generating wind and bloating and a general air of dissatisfaction. A proper loaf, of real bread, is dense and chewy and full of whatever you put in it – and nothing else! Whether wheat, spelt, rye, corn, oats, seeds and nuts and   fruit, a basic loaf is just flour, yeast, salt and water. Mix them together, add time...

You wouldn't think it would be necesary to have a cheat's version of a Victoria sponge. After all, it's such a simple cake to make ... or is it? Everyone loves a good Vicky sponge - the simple buttery moistness, light crumb and vanilla scent preparing the way for a big hit of raspberry jam. And on the face of it, a VS should be straightforward, with predictably good results: equal quantities of butter, sugar and flour, eggs and vanilla and you're there ... right? Wrong, it seems. Because when I do baking classes, and I ask relatively confident cake makers what they most fear, they tell me it's the VS. The mixture curdles; it won't rise or it sinks in the middle; the crust separates and cracks; it's as tough and chewy as an old brick. One of my pupils astonished me by actually managing to turn out two flat pancakes when the rest of us - working with the same ingredients, measurements, tins and ovens - had done uniformly well. "You see," she ye...

I was asked to cater a private celebration lunch and the star of the menu was to be a whole suckling pig. When you have such a statement main course, I think you need to hang back on the accompaniments and keep things simple but they do also have an important role to play, the most important of which is to mop up all the lovely piggy juices. I wanted something slightly more special than potatoes or bread, so I combined the two and made potato bread. There are quite a few recipes online but in the end I devised one myself and I was really pleased with the results. It went down really well with the lunchers, too. Ingredients You will need 3-400g of cold mashed potato - make extra next time you're cooking, or make it ahead of time. Don't add seasoning or butter to the potato, just mash and set aside.   1tsp dried active yeast (or 1 sachet quick yeast or 15g fresh) half tsp sugar 450g strong white bread flour 12g salt 1tbsp vegetable oil 300-350ml warm water In a sma...

Well, that's what it felt like when I started out to do a canapé party for a client. 70 people, 10 different canap é s (8 savoury, 2 sweet), roughly 1.5 of each kind for each person, served over a 2-hour period. That's 70 x 15 = just over 1,000 morsels. Trust me, it felt like a lot more! When a client requests such an event, the first thing is to draw up menus for them to choose from. I evaluate the function (hopefully with a good indication of the client's profile and spending base) and offer 6 or 8 in each category (meat, fish, veggie, sweet), with a back-up list in reserve if those don't appeal. Into the costing must be factored the time each canap é might take to prepare, and to assemble and serve, bearing in mind that a canape's size and delicacy is directly inverse to the time it takes to prepare and serve. In this case I cannot have been thinking clearly when I pre-selected the list and my client, correctly, chose the most expensive and time-consuming m...