CakePops are Dead! Long live the MallowPop!

We've all made cake pops - good grief - what a bore!

For starters, who really wants a mouthful of dry cake, mixed with sickly sweet buttercream?  Then there's the fact that they take soooo long to make, fall off if you make them too big, or include too much buttercream... No, no.  The cakepop is dead.

Puy lentil salad, with roasted vegetables and king oyster mushrooms

It's inevitable, as predictable as the rising sun - come the first of January and we all feel the call of the detox. I've been craving lentils ever since I caught the Nigel Slater show over Christmas - his dish of warm lentil salad, horseradish and rare beef chimed somewhere with my overloaded palate... However I really wanted to make it meat-free, and to incorporate some roasted king oyster mushrooms. The mushrooms are meaty enough - they're perfect for roasting and absorb the flavour of anything they're dressed in.  I coated them in porcini oil, and salt and pepper and roasted them for around 30 minutes.

Christmas Stuffing

Food bloggers record their recipes for a variety of reasons - sometimes we've learnt something that we'd like to share with others, for example the correct range to maintain a gel for Meat Fruit - and on other occasions it really is just a gigantic aide-mémoire!  The more mundane recipes on my blog are in reality the ones I use the most - they make their way onto here so that no matter where I am, I can turn to them time and again...

Butter Poached Lobster (sous vide), with Girolles and Hazelnuts

Girolles and hazelnuts are just the most glorious combination - both sweet, nutty and earthy, they complement each other well.  The lobster was actually just a vehicle for the girolles, and it could just as easily have been baked squash I made last week, or any number of roasted vegetables.

Girolles are a beautiful colour - they look (and are said to smell) like apricots.  They generally grow in a group together, and are best picked a few days after rain, to allow a decent amount of growth.

Braised Ox Cheek

In January I found myself tucking into a braised ox-cheek, in the middle of a horrific snow storm.  We were in Cheltenham to shoot, a shoot which would subsequently be called off due to 5ft snow drifts. We'd lunched at the fabulous Le Champignon Sauvage and were supposed to have an early dinner in the dining room at the Ellenborough hotel.  With the storm raging around us however, the chef had abandoned us in a fit of pique - apparently he had set up for a conference of two hundred people, and the whole thing had been cancelled at the last moment.

Sweetcorn Fritters

It must be autumn, I'm craving all manner of autumnal veg, from pumpkin to sweetcorn, and every variety of squash and mushroom I can find.  I genuinely think we eat too much meat in our diets, and there is no reason not to have a delicious warm lunch, where the star is the vegetable.

One of my favourites is sweetcorn fritters - but I tend to mix an additional ingredient in, just to add a little variety.  Today's variation was raw orange pepper.  I love raw peppers, but some people find it indigestible, so you could add anything else you fancy.  Crab perhaps? Always delicious. Spring onions? Grated courgettes?

Lemon Drizzle Cake

All bow to Mary Berry, the queen of baking.  And it's true, if I'm looking for a traditional bake, I'll usually look at her recipe first and then move on to check out any variations.  In this case we've never moved beyond Mary's recipe, and it's the cake the children ask for most.  If made using the all-in-one method in a food processor, it literally can be in the oven in five minutes... C'mon - who doesn't have time for a five minute cake???

Heston Blumenthal's Perfect Burger

Yay, it's finally BBQ season... It may look like I only cook chocolate delice and frangipane tarts, but hey, my kids like a burger as much as the next person.  Of course that wouldn't be a generic supermarket burger, and so finally the opportunity to try Heston's perfect burger recipe.  I'd seen this recipe on his How to Cook Like Heston show, but we didn't fire our BBQ at all last year, and so the itch grew and grew.

Stir-fried prawns, pork and squid with glass noodles, chilli and mint

The sun is coming out, and so it's time to eat 'cleaner' food.  I'm a huge fan of Japanese cuisine, but there's something very appealing in Asian salads from all over the continent.  This Cambodian salad, from Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey, really hits my buttons.

Best of all it cane be made in advance - perfect for Sunday evening when you're trying to recover from the post-Sunday lunch blow-out!

Chocolate Delice

I realise that I don't usually pay homage to a chef when making a recipe, but the legendary Monsieur Blanc is no ordinary chef!  Nearly as important to my culinary journey as the Roux Brothers, Raymond is completely self-taught, and his Manoir aux Quat'Saisons has held two Michelin stars since 1985 - no mean feat.  As well as sharing my birthday, Raymond is a most amusing and very brave man - he served both his first and second wife a croquembouche on their wedding day...