My first doughnuts were scarily good – crispy, fluffy, so light – the polar opposite of a Dunkin’. Recipe followed slavishly from Baking with Passion. There’s definitely a fried-dough-for-breakfast slippery slope and I’m sliding…

A white sourdough from Handmade Loaf. A bit overproofed in my hot kitchen but delish.

I’ve started cooking whole packages of grains and beans as soon as I buy them, then portioning them out for the freezer. I do this with cooked veg too, like butternut squash (good for muffins or gnocchi), aubergines (for baba ganoush) and beetroot. So a quick defrost of some spelt, golden beetroot and peas, leftover chard stalks given a quick sauté, a dressing of tahini/honey/lemon juice/olive oil and some roasted cashews and dinner was served. Very quick, very good.

My freezer was overflowing from bread crusts, so I made this English spiced currant bread pudding from Dan Lepard. So good, and a nice alternative to the Italian one I normally do.

They ran out of Digestives at the supermarket, so I made these buckwheat biscuits instead, from one of my favourite Italian blogs. Extra yum when brushed with egg wash, sprinkled with demerara sugar and cut into elephant shapes. I eat them trunk-first.

The week’s crackers are these knäckebröd, made from rye flour. Make sure to roll ‘em thin!

I made another version of the torta salata from last week, this time using sieved full fat cottage cheese as the base cheese, with chunks of provolone and mortadella.

And an impromptu triumph for movie night pudding at our friend Dave’s: the deal is that he provides the amazing home theatre system, we turn up with pizza and dessert and I snooze through whatever foreign film’s picked out that week. (Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville. Gave me very weird dreams.) Anyway, I made this trifle: toasted flaked almonds on top, then a layer of thick vanilla custard, then caramelised diced apples, then finally a base of the leftover half of a cinnamon wholewheat cake soaked in orange juice, ginger wine and Amaretto.

If you serve a meal to an Italian, and ask if they like it, they will be honest. Occasionally brutally so. You will also be offered a series of steps to redo the dish properly the way that they / their dad / their grandmother makes it.

This honesty can be a bit of a facer, especially for us reserved English. “Mmmm, nice!” is about as critical as we get, in public anyway. But I try to bear in mind, while biting my tongue, that the Italians are damn right to give advice. We should all be critical of what we eat and strive for the best we can, in terms of the time we put in, the ingredients and the results. Italians have just been doing all this a lot longer and better than the rest of us, so the benefit of their experience can sound a bit… bossy. Dictatorial. Black or white. Right vs very, very wrong. It doesn’t help either that the “right” way to do something can vary from one town to the next.

But if you haven’t grown up there, there’s a lot of stuff that you’re just missing if you want to cook pasta well. The Knowledge hasn’t oozed in unwittingly over years of living. So here are my top tips, put together over the last couple of years cooking for my own domesticated Italian. It’s quite a bossy list actually – maybe I’m learning more than I thought. This week: dried pasta.

1. Match the pasta to the sauce

Whole books have been written on this subject to help those of us who didn’t learn by osmosis during an italian childhood. But if you follow these rules, you’ll be ok:

• Generally, oil-based sauces or seafood (aglio/olio/peperoncino, lemon/oil/parmesan, clams) go with long pasta – all that surface area helps the sauce to adhere.
• Chunky sauces, like meat ragu or cauliflower/raisins/pinenuts, go with short, chunky, holey pasta which picks up the bits. The chunkier the sauce, the bigger the pasta.
• If in doubt, use penne rigate

There are as many exceptions to the above as there are local specialties but they all exist following these basic tenets – for example chewy, twisty but short trofie have lots of toothsome surface area to absorb oily pesto. The Roman bucatini are extra thick spaghetti with a hole down their length which can stand up to a chunky tomato/pancetta amatriciana sauce. Tuscan pici are hand-rolled and chunky enough to pick up all the bits on the plate from a meaty ragu…

Also – make more sauce that you think you’ll need – at home you can afford to be more generous than a restaurant would be, and if there’s some leftover it makes for a quick meal out of the freezer.

2. Stop making watery sauces!

Reduce, reduce, reduce. If you’re making any kind of “chunky” sauce with tomatoes, a meat ragu or vegetables, the sauce should be thick enough that it takes a good seven seconds for it to close up behind a wooden spoon dragged through the saucepan. This takes at least half an hour, no shortcuts.

Err on the side of having a sauce that’s too thick – ladle out a bit of the pasta water while it’s cooking and use that to thin it down when combining the sauce with the pasta. The starchy water can help to amalgamate everything. But there should be no sloshing of sauce separately from the pasta on the plate – it should all be one, cohesive whole.

3. Forget about fresh tomatoes

Unless you live somewhere with proper tomatoes, that is. What’s a proper tomato? Well, if you have to ask, you haven’t tasted one. I’ve been fortunate enough to travel a bit and the only tomatoes worthy of the name I had about 50km outside Rome. Anywhere else served by supermarkets, even other Italian cities, they’re crap – tough skinned bags of pink water and crunchy seeds. Bleugh.

So any time you read a recipe that says “and while the pasta is cooking, chop some tomatoes and throw in the pan…” forget it – you will end up with a load of acidic water. There just isn’t enough juicy tomatoey “meat” in supermarket fruit to thicken up quickly.

95% of the time it’s wise to use the best quality tinned tomatoes or passata you can get your hands on. Check the ingredients – there should only be tomatoes, but sometimes you can’t avoid basil. Anything with garlic, onion or oregano is rubbish and shouldn’t go near your kitchen. See number 2 above and reduce your tomatoes down for a good 1/2 hour at least.

To get a sauce from fresh supermarket tomatoes, even the fancy ones that use a carbon ton of packaging to individually preserve their oh-so-perfect forms, need to be peeled by dunking in boiling water, deseeded, chopped and then sautéed in olive oil for thirty minutes minimum. You’re right, this is a complete pain in the arse and I only bother doing it for delicate ingredients like fish which might not stand up to the tinned stuff.

I sometimes make an exception for teensy cherry tomatoes as well, the ones no bigger than a grape, which need slightly less time in the pan. There’s no peeling or deseeding, just halve them to let the juices out. But I’d still pair them with strong flavours – rocket and black olives, or prawns, for example – rather than expecting any great flavour of their own to shine through.

Oh, and never store tomatoes in the fridge. But you knew that, right?

4. Don’t cook the pasta until the sauce is ready

There’s nothing worse than putting the pasta on too early, then desperately trying to reduce down a hopelessly thin sauce, trying to choose between overcooked pasta with a decent sauce, or al dente pasta with a watery sauce. Finish the sauce first, turn the heat to minimum or off, then throw in the pasta.

5. Use more salt

Don’t mess around with salting the pasta water – think seawater. Use coarse rock salt and add literally a fistful to a medium-large pan. Don’t wimp out at the last minute and think “that’s an awful lot” – the pasta will only absorb as much salt as it needs anyway. Adding extra salt to the finished dish just doesn’t taste the same as having properly salted pasta to start with.

The only time you might want to hold back on this is if you’re doing a gorgonzola/walnut sauce, because the cheese is already insanely salty. But otherwise, chuck it in!

6. La pasta scotta – no!

Read the cooking time on the packet, divide by two and add a minute. Start tasting from that point onwards (e.g. from minute 7 for “12 minute” spaghetti), one strand or shape at least every minute. You’re looking for the point where the uncooked, raw, white core of the pasta (the bit that makes it unpalatably chewy when undercooked) gradually gets thinner and just disappears. Test every thirty seconds when you’re getting close. With time and familiarity with your brand of pasta, you can test less, but by trying the pasta when really quite underdone, you gradually get to see how al dente you like it.

Cooking time can vary with the sauce too – I adore really, really al dente pasta with clams. In fact, with oily sauces, you can take the pasta out a good three or four minutes early and finish cooking it in the sauce – that way, the flavours are impregnated into the pasta and the starch thickens the oily sauce naturally.

When you drain the pasta, leave it quite wet (and for god’s sake, no running it under the tap). You need the extra starchy cooking moisture to thin out your lovely, thick sauce, remember? Tip the pasta into the sauce and combine really well – no dollops of sauce on top of naked pasta. Everything needs to combine in a big meld of pasta lurve. It should be making slurping noises as you slap it around in the pan.

A tip on brands – you can’t go wrong with De Cecco. It’s available all over the world and is the Nutella of pasta – universally beloved by Italians and non. If you use crap pasta (anything from Barilla on down) it’s impossible to get al dente – it just goes from raw to floppy. Same goes for wholewheat pasta – it’s practically impossible to cook properly so you have to resign yourself to crunch or flop.

So those are my hard-won pearls of wisdom and we haven’t had any food fights yet at home. Next time, my top tips on making fresh pasta without needing three arms or it ending up down your bra… It’s been a long road…

Here are some answers to readers’ questions (hi dad!)

Is microwaving leftover pasta for lunch really bad?
Yes. It goes floppy and disgusting. There is no excuse for this if you aren’t a student, and even then only with a raging hangover. Heat it in a hot pan with olive oil if you must. Otherwise, put it in a frittata or bake a timballo.

How much sauce is enough?
If you have reduced your sauce properly, the pasta will let you know when you combine it. It’ll pick up what it needs in the pan, leaving the rest behind when you serve. Tongs are really useful here, especially for seafood or very chunky sauces. You can fish out more of the good bits once the pasta is plated. If you’ve done a ridiculous amount of sauce, then you can set some aside first. But really, quantities will depend on numbers of people and how much they eat – F and I together eat about half as much as one tiny slip of a girl we know packs away, so ymmv.

How are you meant to combine the pasta with the sauce? How wet should it be then?
In the pan you’ve cooked the sauce in. This means it should be big enough and deep enough to take the pasta without going everywhere. A high sided saute pan or “chef” pan with sloping sides is good here – I find a frying pan a bit too shallow and a normal saucepan too high and awkward to see what’s going on. You should plan to drain the pasta very al dente also because it gets cooked a tiny bit more during this process. You can use a big mixing bowl too, indeed you have to for the eggy bit of a carbonara, but that’s an extra thing to wash up – your call. I tend to use tongs and one of those pasta spoons to combine everything well. Other people insist on doing that cheffy tossing thing, flipping the pasta over itself by moving the pan back and forth violently. Please don’t do that in my kitchen, it takes me three days to find and clean all the tomato sauce off the walls. But however you roll, no naked sauce-less strands!

As for consistency – if it’s a tomatoey sauce then it shouldn’t be so thick that the pasta all sticks together in one claggy lump. But not so wet that there is even a hint of swimming, or the sauce moving around on the plate without the pasta. Always make the sauce a lot thicker than you think. For oily sauces like pesto, you just want to make sure that each strand is covered well, and the pasta will take up what it needs. It’s all quite zen really, you’ve got to listen to what the pasta’s telling you…

What about that gourmet pasta trafilata al bronzo? Isn’t that spaghetti rough enough to take ragu, like handmade pici?
Yes, some of those brands are lovely – the roughness means it’s easier to get al dente and they really pick up sauce well. You can have those “bronze-extruded” spaghetti with ragu, but penne are better, just for their chunky, sauce gathering properties.

What about ribbon pasta?
Ribbon pastas like pappardelle, fettuccine and tagliatelle are the dried, convenience versions of their fresh counterparts, so they tend to have eggs and a softer texture than standard dried pasta. I’ll get to them in a bit.

I really should include the boring, healthy meals we eat here – the emergency storecupboard pastas, the “errrrrr tuna mayo and tomato salad?” lunches, the fridge-end frittatas. Otherwise you might get the idea, from the list below, that we’re either sugar addicts or carb-loading for an Iron Man in the desert… Anyway, here’s some ideas from the nights where I put the effort in as well as some lazy, rainy afternoons of baking!

This is the last, lonely, soon to be late slice of a super-light and somewhat healthy cake. A fatless wholewheat sponge, just leavened with eggs and baking powder, flavoured with cinnamon. Definitely needs to be soaked or sandwiched – we opted for crema pasticciera with blackberries. Keeps really well in the fridge too, as the cake just gets moister. Extra pastry cream on the side is essential. Original recipe for cinnamon blackberry cake in Dan Lepard’s Short and Sweet (on iTunes).

Torta di bietole. Pizza dough to line a springform tin, then filled with swiss chard, ricotta, onion and pancetta and baked until golden. Perfect picnic food because it’s so transportable, but also great for lunches, kitchen suppers, buffets. A recipe that’s been on my mind since Nigella’s pizza rustica in HTBADG, although her version uses an unleavened pastry dough. Should imagine this freezes well. Stretching out the dough was a bit of a challenge, partly my cackhandedness but also, I think, the low protein content of my Gold Medal AP flour – I’ll use bread flour next time.

Sweet brandy buns. Another Dan recipe here from Handmade Loaf – mine are a bit flat because I forgot to put the yeast in… um…. they smelled nice though…

Really nice one this – breadsticks made with semola di grano duro and rice flour. The dough comes together really easily, and definitely one you can rustle up on a Sunday morning before lunch.

This cauliflower risotto was immediately declared a “top 25″ house recipe by my man-with-a-plan. The inspiration came from this in AGT – a nice idea to cook some cauliflower florets in the stock you’ll use for the risotto, as well as topping with an anchovy pangrattato (I just used the oil and a couple of anchovies from the tin to sauté some breadcrumbs with a pinch of chilli flakes). I subbed a tiny bit of gruyere for all that butter/mascarpone/taleggio, and also added the other half of the cauliflower cooked until brown and caramelised in the oven (above). Yum.

My first attempt at a brioche dough with raisins and pinenuts – hand kneading as well, which is a bit of a “fuck, please don’t let the phone ring now” sticky nightmare. Tastes unbelievable though, weirdly enough the best topping seems to be Fabio’s favourite, really good olive oil and salt. Recipe here on an absolutely brilliant blog if you read Italian or can deal with Google translate – I’ll do my own version after another couple of tries.

I also tried Ottolenghi’s meatballs baked with aubergine – I opted to cook both the aubergine slices and the meat patties on the griddle which worked really nicely and made the dish a lot lighter. The tamarind paste a must to set off the smoky flavours.

And last but not least, maple ice-cream with wet walnuts, from David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop. Normally I work out my own recipes for ice-creams, but there was, shall we say, some pressure from the powers that be to “provide icecream quickly and not spend three hours mucking around in excel working out percentages of dextrose and inverted sugar”. Obviously that was all communicated by a wobbling lower lip, but I know my guy. I needed a recipe, stat! This tastes like premium American brand ice-cream, actually preeeetty much like the Haagen Dazs one with pecans. Too rich for me on its own, but tomorrow we’re trying it with baked apples.

So much more than the sum of its parts. No quantities today – go by feel and what’s on hand (I followed Siri’s really helpful guidelines).

Soften some leeks in a pan. While that’s happening, make a velouté with fish stock in your soup saucepan. Easier than it sounds – a thin béchamel sauce made with stock instead of milk.

When the velouté has thickened just a little, add some diced, floury potato and the leeks.

Simmer until the potato is soft. There might not be enough liquid, so add milk and a splash of cream so the soup is the right soupy consistency. Time for a glass of cold white.

Meanwhile, cut some salmon* and cod* fillets into bitesize pieces, and shell and devein some nice prawns. (If you are organized, you can prepare the prawns earlier and use the sautéed shells to bolster the fish stock.)

Warm through some nice bread in the oven to get it all crusty.

Lay the table and finely chop some dill.

Now chuck in the fish and prawns to the hot, just simmering soup – it’ll be ready in the time it takes you to take the bread out of the oven and set it on a cutting board.

Ladle soup into bowls. Sprinkle with dill. Serve with bread. Breathe long sigh of relief.

* Better, ocean-friendly substitutes. My fishmonger was sorely lacking.

I’m not quite sure where the Vesper management are trying to pitch this restaurant. On the one hand, there’s the “high-end speakeasy” concept which is a bit tired, more New York ’97 than glitzy Miami 2012. They get you to walk through the kitchen on your way in – it’s awkward and unflatteringly lit, especially sober at 7pm. The decor is nice – buzzy patio outside, 50′s lines inside.

The food, though, just doesn’t get there. The menu is wholly unchallenging, full of “American classics”, and so far it could be good – a really well done plate of oysters and a bloody steak is a great meal out in my book. But Vesper really needs to get the staff or the gear to cook their steaks properly. I asked for a filet mignon Pittsburgh, which should be mooing on the inside and as charred as can be on the outside. What I got was a really nice, tasty piece of meat, cooked really boringly – anaemic, only very lightly charred on the two ends, the sides hardly browned at all. That’s a steak I’d expect in London and it’s a shame. And daft – there’s competition for good steak in Miami.

The rest was alright, but it all could have been a lot better, e.g. the baked potato was dry inside, the asparagus were huge and a bit woody, the steak not stellar, creme brulée decent but nothing special, industrial rather than homemade icecream… You know what, that’s fine, it’s a different level of dining from BLT or Red – but if it’s going to be room service standard food, I’d expect to pay a lot less. Prices were nearly up there at the BLT mark and they shouldn’t be – Miami diners won’t come back. There’ll be traffic from the captive hotel guests upstairs, but that isn’t going to sustain Vesper.

Oh, another thing (and this is a general heartfelt plea to restauranteurs everywhere), if you are going to have minuscule tables for two, don’t serve side dishes that could feed six in giant dishes, give your diners enormous steak knives and expect them to conduct some sort of balletic mock fencing duel for the entire meal. We were given an entire felled forest of asparagus as well as a baked potato the size of a bus and it was all we could do to not alternately ping food in the air or send the whole lot crashing to the ground. Vesper isn’t packed yet so they shouldn’t pretend to need the floor space – for the love of pristine white tablecloths, give the customers a little more elbow room!

Just my five cents, and despite these comments we ate everything pretty happily. If I were new to town, just off the plane and hungry, I’d have been perfectly satisfied. Service was prompt and friendly. We had a wholly decent, average meal – but unfortunately I don’t think Vesper were aiming for just average.

Ceviche 105
A cool cement floored, lime accented space, was thronged on our week night visit with date night couples, big tables of young families coralling kids, cocktail drinking friends and the odd tourist (us). Our waiter explained the confusing menu (if you don’t know Peruvian food, that is – four types of ceviche sauce, from boring through spicy to eat this if you think you’re hard enough, endless potato variations). Everything was brilliant, especially the octopus in red wine, the causa, the prize-winning ceviche and the gorgeous and (for me) unusual desserts. I’m honestly not equipped to give more of a critique of this type of food but what I do know is that I can’t wait to go back and “do” the menu, top to bottom. This could be our Doraku substitute for when the bridge to Miami Beach is jam packed.

DB Bistro Moderne
They’re trying very hard to be designy and contemporary here, but this is still a hotel restaurant, and a Mariott at that. It shows a bit in the back room decor. And the service is all ten waiters to a table, New Yorkish, obsequious bustle: terribly efficient, but the tone feels wrong in Miami. I wasn’t really hungry and so chose really boringly (oysters, tuna tartare, YAWN) but the rest of the crew said they ate exceptionally well, some of the best cooking they’ve had in Miami ever. I’m so jealous, and will be back after a massive kite session with an appetite!

Zuma, again.
I’ve bitched out Zuma in multiple cities for being a) ridiculously difficult to book without a full time PA b) too loud c) too air conditioned and, of course, d) too expensive. But [commence hat eating] we ate soooo well here over new years. Pork belly robata skewers with mustard sauce (umamilicious), seared escobal (so delicate), seabass sashimi with truffle oil and salmon roe, perfect tempura, wagyu beef. A new menu item, cold snow crab salad with soba noodles, was a refreshingly bland contrast, more subtle than most dishes. Desserts great, the particularly beautiful fruit plate and yuzu key lime pie were the standouts. Service was impeccable, Miami friendly, platinum blonde and red lipped. Can’t ask more than that. Apart from a substantial discount.

Pubbelly sushi
They don’t take reservations, so two of us went to eat ridiculously early on a random Tuesday and got seated straightaway. Turnover’s fast so I imagine you don’t have to wait for long anyway. The food is maialissimo, that is to say very, very moreish. Crab tempura roll with a minimum of rice but loaded with tartare sauce and bacon. Light and fresh yellowtail and yuzu rolls. New England lobster roll in a buttery bun. Wagyu beef carpaccio with a poached egg, balsamic braised mushrooms and truffle shoestring fries. Lip-smacking chicken from the robata grill. Dessert was insane – some kind of f-ed up bread and butter pudding, which had what seemed like a whole melted Mars Bar in there. Not my thang, but Fabio inhaled happily. Who gives a crap if it’s authentic – and what does that even mean in Miami? It’s fricking delicious – just go!

We are building a house.

You can tell because we’re now surgically attached to tape measures and will take down dimensions of patios, doors, countertops, shelves, drawers and anything else that’s vaguely construction-related…

You can tell because when we’re not measuring, we’re poring over spreadsheets, particularly the “rough estimate” and “actual builders’ quotes” columns, wincing at the differences…

You can also tell from the look of blind panic glinting in our wide, red-rimmed eyes.

Obviously, this is not an ideal time to give up sugar or caffeine, so I made this tart to go with the morning coffee.

In the spirit of parsimonious budgeting, which will no doubt prevail for the next 25 years given how much it costs to build in the Bahamas, I used up the last of my mincemeat from last year and some leftover pastry from this crostata, just enough to line a 18cm deep quiche tin. Blind bake for 15 minutes at 180˚C. Meanwhile mix half a jar of mincemeat with two handfuls of fresh white breadcrumbs. Peel, core and slice two ripe pears. When the pastry base is golden, spread over the mincemeat, arrange the pear slices on top and bake for 20 minutes. You’ll see from the photo that I didn’t have quite enough filling for the depth of the tin – I remembered too late that I had a jar of Bonne Maman fig preserves in the cupboard that would have made a nice addition, but no matter: this was lovely warm with ice-cream.

Another riff on this yoghurt crust from Clotilde, which is a go-to supper of mine when there’s a bit of wilting green stuff in the fridge and some random bits of cheese… What? You think I actually plan stuff like meals?

Chard and feta tart on buckwheat yoghurt crust

A simple way to showcase your favourite veg… or use up fridge ends. Makes enough for two for supper.

Ingredients

• 100g AP flour
• 60g buckwheat flour
• 20g semola di grano duro (or fine cornmeal/polenta)
• 60g butter
• 120g full fat yoghurt
• 1 bunch chard, stalks and leaves separated, chopped
• 1/2 large red onion, sliced
• 60g creme fraiche or sour cream
• 100g feta

Instructions

1. Make the pastry: rub butter into the mixed flours and stir in a large pinch salt. Add yoghurt and bring together into a soft dough. Wrap in clingfilm and chill for 1/2 hour.
2. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 180˚C. Saute chard stalks and sliced onion in olive oil until soft, then add leaves and cook until wilted. Set aside to cool.
3. Blind bake the tart: roll out pastry between two sheets of parchment to 5mm thick. Transfer to baking sheet. Curl over edges to form a thin rim. Prick with fork and bake for 15 minutes uncovered.
4. Turn on grill. Remove tart from oven. Spread with chard mixture. Crumble over feta and dot with creme fraiche. Grill until golden and bubbling, 10 minutes. Sprinkle with chopped fresh herbs and serve.

Preparation time: 1 hour(s)

Cooking time: 25 minute(s)

Number of servings (yield): 2

When I was little, Shrewsbury was impossibly big and exotic compared to my home town – there were supermarkets (!) and escalators (!!) and it was very far away indeed. Over the Welsh hills we would go in our pink Volvo*, an interminable journey punctuated by Polos and spotting the only two landmarks along the route: a big shale patch in the shape of a rabbit on a hillside and a large rock next to the road with the word ELVIS spray-painted on it. (The paint was seemingly renewed every year – for all I know someone’s still doing it, and it remains a bright beacon should He decide to return to the valleys.)

These biscuits are the baked companion to the griddled welshcakes shared here in the past – curranty, lemony and slightly chewy from the egg white glaze. I don’t have a vivid memory of eating these homely creations, but they are instantly familiar – an appealing ordinariness without fuss or fancy. How unlike the Shrewsbury of old.

*Dad insists it was copper coloured but I remember.

Shrewsbury biscuits

Light, lemony, curranty biscuits. Makes about 20.

Ingredients

• 100g butter, softened
• 150g caster sugar
• granulated sugar for sprinkling (or just use more caster)
• 2 egg yolks, plus 1 white
• 220g AP or plain flour
• 60g currants
• zest of 1 lemon
• pinch of salt
• a little milk

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4. Line a big baking tray with parchment.
2. Cream the butter and sugar together in a bowl large enough to take the whole dough. Beat in the yolks one at a time.
3. Fold in the dry ingredients – flour, zest, salt, currants.
4. Add enough milk, one or two tablespoons, to bring together into a smooth dough.
5. Roll out on floured worktop to about 4mm thick. There’s no leavening agent so don’t go too thin… but too thick and they’ll be a bit enormous. Cut out rounds about 6cm across and place on prepared tray. Bake for 10 minutes.
6. Lightly beat the egg white with a fork. Take out the biscuits, brush with the white, sprinkle with the granulated sugar and bake again until pale golden brown, about 5-10 minutes. Cool on the tray to firm up for a bit, then on racks.

Preparation time: 10 minute(s)

Cooking time: 20 minute(s)

Number of servings (yield): 12

Going through my photo library, I’ve realised how much of my baking recently has been thanks to Dan Lepard’s super recipes. I’m particularly impressed with his new book Short and Sweet (there’s a nice iBooks edition) which is a deceptively simple read. At first glance, the recipes are all completely manageable home cooking, without excessively difficult techniques or fripperies – it’s all stuff I’d serve happily to friends and family without “look what I did” show-offiness. You might think there are hundreds of similar baking guidebooks out there. But I keep going back to this one: look closely, and there are lovely flavour combinations, cogently written tips that explain the science behind the methods used and gentle suggestions about where to go next. And of course, every recipe I’ve tried has a beautiful solidity to it – you just know they’re going to work. I’ve just baked his brown sugar chocolate cake, slathered in chocolate treacle icing – a teatime treat for this under-the-weather household (sneezes & snot, it’s all glamour here). And the butterscotch banana cake was easy to knock up for an apres-ski treat, and even converted Fabio (not a banana cake fan) to the cause.

Of course, there’s been a fair bit of his bread too: a very nineties, but delicious loaf with sun dried tomatoes encrusted in polenta (recipe in the Guardian) – I’m waiting for this to get stale to make a savoury bread pudding with good cheddar.

And a lovely mill loaf, with masses of sourdough starter, from The Handmade Loaf – a completely different sort of book this, full of ideas, traditions and techniques. A book to sink your teeth into.

Alright, there was one dud in the batch, due to my internal blondeness rather than any fault with the recipe – these dark rye crisp breads (top picture), also from The Handmade Loaf. First I undercooked them, then I neglected them in the oven and brought them out completely carbonised… But they look pretty and the pre-charcoal smell was gorgeous.