This is a very simple sauce, condiment if you will, that I use mostly on Trilogies but which also goes very well with carpaccio of beef, tomatoes on their own or more or less any place where you find a need for something a bit vinaigrette-y.And best of all it’s really simple to make.Buy a basil plant or, if you’re a gardening whizz, grow one. Go on, I’ll wait. Tum te tum. Ok.Now, pull of the leaves. You can leave the tiny stalks attached to the leaves but nothing more.When you have a container full of leaves, add about 4 cms of olive oil and a small pinch of salt, then whizz it up with your cheap stick mixer. Add more olive oil as you go. Keep mixing until your mixer feels to hot, then taste the oil. You can add a fair amount of oil – I reckon one plant’s good for about 250-400 ml of oil.You can use it as it is, or add lemon juice or another acid to really transform it into a vinaigrette. Add parmesan too and it goes well on crunchy salad leaves or beef carpaccio.It’ll keep a bit in the fridge but be careful, you’re smooshing all sorts of bugs into the basil which could harm you. 

Well, crêpes really I suppose. I think of ‘pancakes’ as being the thick, stodgy affairs my mother cooked on Pancake Day (Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras) when I was a kid, or those things served in American diners. Which are fine and which I love with maple syrup and butter and bacon, but crêpes are finer, more delicate.At catering school we used to compete to see who could make the most from a one-litre batter (that is, a batter made with one litre of milk, not one litre of batter itself). I managed 28 and a half; David, my arch-rival at school, managed 32 but only by cheating – some of his crêpes were undersized and full of holes. So I won.The recipe is pretty simple: 1 litre of milk, 450g flour, a pinch of salt, 50g of sugar, 6 whole medium eggs and 50g of melted butter.If you do this properly and your catering school teacher is standing over you, you cream together the sugar and eggs and gradually stir in the flour and salt, and then the milk and butter; if he’s not watching you dump everything in the mixing bowl at once and whisk it all together. I then leave it for half an hour and give it another going over with the electric whisk – until all the lumps are gone.Next, cooking your crêpes. Many will know the maxim that “the first one always sticks” and has to be thrown away; this is either because your pan isn’t hot enough, or because you didn’t add a little oil to the pan, or both. Basically, get your pan hot – leave it to warm for at least five minutes – and then just before adding the batter wipe it over with a paper towel dipped in your oil/butter/fat of choice. I use a mix of butter and sunflower oil and never have any sticking. I have a 5cl ladle which is the exact size necessary for one crêpe, but don’t be afraid to add in a bit too much batter and swirl it around the pan before tipping out the excess – just don’t make them too thick or they’ll taste claggy.And then it’s just a question of churning them out. Keep two pans going, more if you have them, and don’t let your attention wander. Also, don’t have your stove too hot – on my electric hob the rings are at 7 on a scale of 1 – 9, which means the crêpes get about two minutes each side.Stack them up and serve them with, well, whatever you like; Nutella’s a big favourite here as is a sugar/lemon mix; sometimes they go for butter and maple syrup, too.And chantilly cream, obviously.This is a half-successful attempt at chantilly cream – it was hot (over 30°C today) and I hadn’t chilled the cream, bowl or whisk as I’d normally do as a matter of course. The problem when it’s hot is that the cream separates quickly into a solid and milky liquid, but it still tastes good albeit a little heavy.Bon appetit!

We (OK, OK, my wife) picked a sack of blackberries when we went for a walk along the old railway line the other day, and she’s been hassling me to do something with them ever since.Like, she said, make a tart. With crème patissiere. And pâte sablé.Well, me and pastry – as they say in French – that makes two; I can’t, won’t make it. I buy it. And pre-made chilled pastry here is nicer than anything I can make myself, so good that people believe me when I say I made it myself. So I bought a 30cm round of ready-made pastry and blind-baked it, 25 minutes at 180°C turning it two or three times to ensure even cooking. Don’t forget to repeatedly stab the base with a fork to stop it rising. And don’t forget to put in your baking beans like I did – this forgetfulness leads to the sides sagging down.While this is cooking, make the crème patissière: for a tart this size, use 500ml of milk, 100g of sugar, 5 egg yolks, 70g plain flour, a vanilla pod and a pinch of salt.Put the milk on to heat with the split/scraped vanilla pod (put the whole pod into the milk to infuse – lots of the vanilla flavour comes from the pod itself rather than the seeds). Whisk together the sugar and egg yolks to the ribbon stage (lift up your whisk and trail the dribbles across the surface of the mix – it should stay in place looking a bit like a ribbon for a second or two). Then whisk in the flour thoroughly.When the milk boils, pour a little into your flour/sugar/egg mix to make it liquid, then add the rest stirring all the time. When it’s thoroughly mixed, pour it back into the saucepan and gently bring it to the boil. Stirring ALL the time, or it will go lumpy. Bring it back to the boil and simmer it for a couple of minutes to thoroughly cook the flour, then decant it into a clean bowl, whisking all the time to avoid those lumps.When it’s cooled a little, cover the surface with a layer of clingfilm (may be called Saran wrap in your part of the world) and refrigerate it. The plastic film stops a skin forming on top. At catering school we learned to dab a little butter onto the surface to stop the skin forming; my restaurant chef, after looking at me like I was a Martian when I suggested doing this, showed me the clingfilm method.When everything has cooled down, check your crème for lumps. Whether there are any or not I like to whisk my crème patissière with an electric whisk at this point to make it easier to handle – a couple of minutes with the electric mixer and it’ll pour easily into your pastry case, allowing you to smooth the surface nice and flat.Then put the blackberries on top. In this example I’ve used the artisanal ‘higgledy-piggledy’ method, i.e. I just poured them on top, roughly smoothed them into a more or less even layer and then tucked in. If you have time and patience you can make them look more artistic, like this one I made earlier (three years earlier, in fact, that’s how often the mood takes me to take the time to do it properly).One last note: for various reasons (OK, I’m lazy and it was the first packet that came to hand) I used brown, less-refined sugar to make this crème patissière and it turned out very well, a subtly caramelised taste which is very pleasant.

So when I was younger – OK, over 40 years ago – I went to an English Public School. The thing you have to know straight away about English Public Schools is that they’re not Public, they’re Private. Not just anyone can go there, OH no. You have to pass an exam – commonly called the Common Entrance Exam – and pay for the privilege. Pay handsomely, in fact.At the time, since my parents were poor and I was outstandingly clever, I got a County Scholarship to go to the school, and a great time I had there too.This is the school, or at least the bit of it that goes back the furthest – all the way to 1616, in fact, when it was founded by William Jones and the Haberdashers’ Guild in London, making it 400 years old this year.Anyway, one of the features of the school of my youth was the school Tuck Shop, a small room in the cloisters where we could queue up at 10.45 every morning to buy sticky currant buns. And very delicious they were too.I’ve had these buns in the back of my mind for the past 40 years, and have now succeeded in reproducing them pretty well, using a recipe for French brioche dough.Well, recipe; I exaggerate – I follow the instructions on the packet, mix it up in my bread machine (my old hands are too stiff to pound dough, what with the carpal tunnel problems and my innate laziness), form the dough into buns and pop them into the oven.Simples.So I buy ‘Farine T45 de force’, strong gluten-rich flour specially made for brioches with added gluten and powdered egg yolk; there’s a regular T45 for doing other patisserie which works, but this works even better. You don’t have to read the small print or delve into details – you just buy the one marked ‘Brioche’ on the front. It’s the powdered egg yolk plus the egg you add later that makes it yellow.The recipe is quite simple: 175ml cold milk, 40g sugar, 8g salt, 75g cold diced butter, a whole medium egg (50g) and 350g of the special flour plus a sachet of dried active yeast (you can get a special brioche yeast here, regular works fine too).I add these ingredients, in this order, to the bread machine and set it going on its 90 minute mixing and raising program (the small curious child above is optional). After about 20 minutes I add the raisins I love (and which the small child above hates) and they get mixed in appropriately. Sometimes I do have a tendency to add a few too many and it looks, as my good friend Caroline’s granny always said, as if they’ve been ‘Thrown in from the top of the stairs’.After an hour and a half the dough has risen; I take it out and divide it into eight (roughly) equal balls and leave them to rise again for half an hour while the oven warms up to 180°C.They rise quite nicely, and when they’re ready to go into the oven I give them a quick egg wash (roughly beat one egg in a bowl or mug, paint it on with your pastry brush).After 12 minutes in the oven I turn the baking tray around 180° and give them another five minutes, to ensure even cooking. Then when they come out and have cooled I give them a sugar syrup coating to make them really shine, nice and glossy.Miam. Serve with some nice salted butter and good strawberry jam. And, if you can get it, clotted cream. 

Just some bread and madeleines.But, miam!

I have made thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of these madeleines. I can make them in my sleep. I may even have made them in my sleep, in fact. I can make them in an hour, enough for a giant birthday party with enough left over for breakfast.In fact, I’ve made so many of these and done it so often that I never even thought of putting the recipe up here. I might as well explain how to make a cup of tea.*But. I got into a discussion over on eGullet about making them. Someone posted a question about where to find new madeleine pans, and I posed a question asking why they didn’t even consider the possibility of using silicone molds? I’ve never, ever made them with metal molds. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen metal molds, and if I had I’d have thought them something from the ancient past, a museum piece.Rusty, in fact. I think of the one or two cake molds I have in metal as rusty antiques which I should throw away. Silicone molds are practical, easy, cheap, durable. Superior.Anyway.So Jean-Rémi Joly taught me this recipe that winter when it was just me in the plonge and him cooking to do all the meals from November to Easter. I’d wash up, prep everything, do the amuse-bouches and the patisserie. Madeleines were a nice touch with our cafés gourmets and we made them by the hundred every day.You start with 500 grammes of sugar and 400 grammes of butter, and cream them together. Use your food mixer, please, unless you want to end up with carpal tunnels swollen to the size of the Blackwall Tunnel like mine.Then add, one by one, nine medium eggs (50 grammes each). Beat each one in gently until it’s fully incorporated before adding the next.Then sieve in 400 grammes of flour (type 45 patisserie flour, if that helps); you may call it ‘plain flour’, or something else. It’s the kind with the most gluten in it. Fold it into the mixture along with a hefty pinch of salt (say, 8 grammes) and bicarbonate of soda (7 grammes).Finish with a slug of rum and the grated zest of a lemon.Then put a small teaspoonful of the mixture into your greased silicone or metal moulds (I grease them with melted unsalted butter) and pop them into a pre-heated oven at 180°C for 12 minutes. Then turn them around 180 degrees and leave for another 3-5 minutes until they’re browned nicely.If you’re the sort of person who likes your madeleines to have a little ‘hump’ on the top, bump up the temperature 10 or even 20 degrees, but check on them after 10 minutes so they don’t burn.The baby madeleines you may be able to make out in these pictures are from, natch, baby madeleine molds. Cute, eh? And so tiny they contain no calories at all.Remove them from the molds after allowing them to cool for 5 minutes – otherwise they’ll stick to the inside – and cool on a wire rack for as long as you can resist eating them. The advantage of silicone molds is that they’re very easy to pop out, pushing them from the other side to get them onto your wire rack.Miam, as they say in Proustian. 

Whilst searching for something suitable as a subject for a dictation for my English-learning French students, I came across a new craze: Freakshakes.They’re milkshakes gone bonkers; milk, ice-cream, chocolate sauce, chantilly, sweeties, doughnuts, apple pies, whatever, all piled into and onto your glass.Miam, as they say in French.Once my daughters saw them, they wanted them for their ‘gouter’, their afternoon tea.So I made some chocolate sauce first. Just melt a bar of dark chocolate slowly in a clingfilm-covered bowl, then slowly stir in enough single cream to make it saucy but still quite thick – thick enough to stick to the inside and outside of your glass, as above.Coating the top of the outside of the glass allows you to stick on Smarties, fraises tagada and whatever other sweeties you like.Into the glass goes some cold milk and a couple of scoops of ice-cream, then a generous helping of chantilly cream on top.Add a few more sweeties and a giant straw and you’re ready to go.Smearing chocolate sauce around the inside of the glass gives an interesting effect and allows small children to keep busy scraping it off later with their sundae spoons.Total production time is about 10 minutes, less if you get your act together and have everything ready to go at production time.Give it a go. It’s as nice for grown ups as for kids.