Moving swiftly on from healthy eating, then, we must remember there are those of us at English Towers (the gangly, floppy haired ones and the skatery types) that still want a little something after school or dinner and demand treats, preferably piled up in an ungainly, chocolatey tower when doing A level revision.

This, and I don’t say this lightly, is my best chocolate brownie recipe ever.  I make it such a lot that I know it off by heart.  Oh yes, it’s been tweaked and added to (pistachios, chopped up Cadbury Fudge bars, rum-soaked raisins), but the plain old dark chocolate version is the one we love.  I also have to make this whenever the Death Wish Dude’s lovely mate, George, comes to visit as he’s a bit of a fan.  You’ll need:

200g dark chocolate (I swear by Bournville – already in a handy 200g size, dark but not too bitter)

170g salted butter (MUST be salted – or add a pinch if using unsalted)

3 eggs

200g soft brown sugar (caster is fine if you don’t have any)

110g plain flour

Preheat the oven to gas 4/180 degrees.

Melt the butter and chocolate in a bain-marie (you know the drill… bowl over a saucepan of just-simmering water – don’t let the bottom of the bowl come into contact with water).  Turn the water off when it’s just bubbling and stir the mixture gently until it’s combined.  Take it off the heat and allow to cool to room temperature.

Whisk the eggs and sugar together until light and frothy, then pour in the cooled chocolate/butter mixture, stir well, then add in the flour and any extras you’re adding (nuts… raisins… smarties… whatever).  Stir briefly until the flour disappears.

Pour into a well-lined baking tin (I use a lasagne tin, but a square cake tin will do).  Bake for about 30 minutes or until the top is cracked and shiny.  The centre should still be slightly soft.  Serve warm with ice cream (or if you’re serving as a dessert, whisk some cream with a bit of icing sugar and a slug of booze) or allow to cool and place in an airtight container

One word of warning: cut them small.  They won’t last long.

So when I was on Nick Coffer’s fabulous Weekend Kitchen show on BBC 3 Counties radio, I met the lovely Christian, AKA Big Mad Cookery Dad.  He made this fabulous dessert and it was soooo good, I’ve asked him to share it with you.  So without further ado, here’s Chris:

Thank you so much for your kind invitation to share a Big Mad Cookery Dad concoction amongst your Christmas recipes. Here is a zesty fusion of a Tiramisu and Creme Brulee with a citrus and boozy hit which really works and gets the big thumbs up at dinner parties and family gatherings alike.

Here’s wishing you and all your readers a very happy and peaceful Christmas and a very happy and successful New Year. And don’t forget, keep on experimenting with new flavours, it’s a big mad foodie world out there!!

Limotiramalee

Zest of 1 lemon, unwaxed and squeezed

Zest of 1 lime, unwaxed

1 tablespoon caster sugar

250ml water

½ pint of double cream

250g Mascarpone cheese

150ml Grand Marnier

1 orange, squeezed

2 tablespoons of caster sugar

Trifle fingers

•

Take the zest of the lemon and the lime and place in a saucepan with the caster sugar and water.  Reduce the mixture until it forms thick syrup.  Strain the zest from the syrup and set aside.  The leftover zest can be used to make cookies or cupcakes!

•

Whip the double cream until it’s just starting to thicken and add the mascarpone and citrus syrup.

•

Start to whisk and add the juice of the lemon whilst whisking – this reacts and sets the mixture into a mousse. Place in the fridge.

•

In a saucepan place the Grand Marnier, the juice of the orange, the caster sugar, and a splash of water. Heat to burn the alcohol off and set aside.

•

In a glass oven dish (a lasagne dish works well) place a layer of trifle fingers across the bottom and add the Grand Marnier mixture. Place in the fridge for a few hours to infuse.

•

After the Grand Marnier mixture has infused into the fingers and is nicely chilled, add the mousse  over the top and smooth down. Place back in the fridge until you are ready to add the brulee topping.

•

When set in the fridge, sprinkle caster sugar over the surface and blitz with a blowtorch until the sugar caramelises. If you don’t have a blowtorch, a really hot grill will work ok.  However if you feel really loopy you can attempt a sugar cage, by lightly oiling a glass mixing bowl, then reducing 2 tablespoons of caster sugar with a splash of water in a non stick pan until it turns golden brown and bubbling.  Quickly with a spoon, drizzle the hot sugar in a criss cross pattern over the bowl until covered.  Leave for 5 minutes to set, and then really carefully lift the cage onto the pud.  Finally spend about an hour cleaning the set sugar spillage off your work surfaces!!!’

Kind Regards

Big Mad Cookery Dad.

Okay, okay, so we’ve missed Stir-up Sunday, but honestly, it doesn’t matter.  If you still fancy doing a bit of lovely therapeutic stirring in the kitchen for Christmas, and filling your house with delicious Christmassy smells, there’s plenty of time.  PLUS this one’s so easy I absolutely, faithfully promise you that it will turn out absolutely perfectly.  How about that for a guarantee?

As usual, feel free to tweak the recipe.  Last year I had loads of time and spent ages snipping up dates and dried apricots.  This year I’d kind of decided not to bother and then changed my mind, so actually just bought a 500g bag of luxury mixed fruit from Waitrose.  Yup, it was that easy.

Remember, if you don’t want to add booze, substitute with fruit juice (or more tea), and if you need the ressup to be Gluten-free I’ve added tips for that too.  If you really must eat peel, though (bleurgh, devil’s toenails), I shall never speak to you again.  Just saying.

Oh and quick tip: tick off the ingredients as you put them in, which will save you doing what I did and forgetting the spices.

Right, here we go then:

Christmas Pudding

500g dried fruit – sultanas, raisins, dried cranberries, chopped dates, dried apricots snipped into small pieces… whatever you like.

1 tbsp Maraschino cherries, halved (optional, but it’s nice to see a little glistening bit of red when you cut it open)

1 lemon

100ml black tea

100ml booze – I used Pedro Jimenez sherry, but you can use rum, brandy… whatever

1 cinnamon stick, snapped in half

3 eggs, beaten

1 tbsp honey

1 tbsp black treacle

1 Bramley apple, grated

100g self raising flour (or rice flour for gluten free – thanks as always to the lovely Pippa for the help regarding gluten)

100g fresh white breadcrumbs (or again, ground almonds if you need to keep the recipe gluten free)

150g veggie suet

150g dark muscovado sugar

25g almonds or pistachio nuts, finely chopped

1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

1/2 tsp ground mixed spice

Weigh out the dried fruit, then have a good pick through and get rid of any stems, they’re yucky if you crunch on them.  I let them fall through my fingers into the bowl a handful at a time.  If you’re using larger dried fruit like prunes or apricots, make sure they’re stoneless and snip them into small pieces.

Finely grate the lemon zest, then juice it as well.  Add the zest and juice to the fruit then brew up the tea (one tea bag is fine for that amount of water) and pour it over the fruit, along with the rum/brandy/whatever.  Add in the cherries and the cinnamon stick and stir it all up.  Cover with a plate and leave the whole shooting match to steep (make sure it’s not a metal bowl) overnight, stirring occasionally if you remember.

The next day, then, weigh out all the dry ingredients and combine them in a huge bowl.  Don’t forget the spices!  The muscovado sugar can be a bit lumpy so you might need to sieve to break up any lumps.

Take the steeped fruit and remove the cinnamon stick pieces.  Add the eggs (give them a quick mix with a fork first), honey, treacle and grated apple (leave the peel on).

Stir well, then you can add all that into the dry ingredients.  Give it a really good stir (get everyone to take a turn to stir and make a wish).

Now butter a big basin (3 pint/1.7  litre) or two small ones and bung in your mixture.  I’ve got a fabulous new Mermaid one which is non-stick, non-scratch and non-whatever else.  It’s also got a nice rim around the top perfect for tying your string round it.   Check out www.mermaidcookware.com.

Cut out a circle of greaseproof paper and butter it well.  Tie around it with string.  Then cover with foil and tie again (this way, you guarantee no water will get in to ruin your pudding).  Or you can tie it in a muslin, or use one of those special circular moulds.

To steam it, you can use a steamer if you’re posh, but I haven’t got one so I just use a huge saucepan and balance the basin inside it on a circular metal pastry cutter so it isn’t sitting on the bottom of the pan.  This will also stop it burning if you inadvertently let it boil dry.  Add boiling water about halfway up the basin and put the lid on the saucepan.  Steam for 5 hours, making sure you go back every so often to top up the boiling water.

And that’s it, you’re done.  I rewrap it with fresh greaseproof paper and foil, but you don’t have to.  Keep it somewhere cool until Christmas day when it’ll need to steam for about another 2.5 to 3 hours (don’t worry if it gets a bit longer, it won’t ruin it).  Or cook it the day before and *gasp* just microwave it on Christmas day.  Much easier, but possibly a little sacrilegious.

BTW: If you want to make little mini puddings instead, remember to put a teeny piece of buttered greaseproof paper in the bottom of your ramekin, otherwise you’ll never get the buggers out.  Then you can just cover them with foil, put them on a deep baking tray, add boiling water to half way up the sides of the ramekins, and bake in the oven for 30 minutes on 180/gas 4.

BTW 2: Nigella advocates vodka rather than brandy to flame a pudding – apparently the flame is better and lasts longer.  Just mind your eyebrows

Off you trot, then.  Smug in the knowledge that you made your own puds.  Just don’t let me down with the peel.  Barf.

I absolutely love Diana Henry.  Her book ‘Food from Plenty’ is one of my absolute favourites, so I was delighted to be offered a copy of her ‘Roast Figs, Sugar Snow’.

This book is just gorgeous.  It’s all about Autumn and Winter, and the ingredients: figs, pumpkins, maple syrup, chestnuts, cranberries, quinces, are so evocative of the seasons.  It’s like a massive warm hug in a book (with an optional hot chocolate).

Some of the recipes I’ve already got bookmarked include Danish Christmas Rice Pudding, snow biscuits, a steamed apple and marmalade pudding and roast figs and plums in vodka with a cardamom cream.  You’re drooling already, right?  It’s the perfect book to curl up with in front of the fire – not just recipes, but a lovely, seasonal read that will get you in the mood to get in the kitchen and rustle up some comforting winter food.

Inspired by this gorgeous book, and by the beautiful soft, dusky orbs in my local farm shop, I thought I’d have a go at roasting some figs.  The result was utterly delicious.  And so easy:

Roast figs with brown sugar and cinnamon

6 figs

50g butter

50g soft brown sugar

1/2 tsp cinnamon

Preheat the oven to gas 5/190 degrees.  In a non-stick baking tin, place the figs, cutting a deep cross into the top of every one.

Melt the butter and brown sugar gently in a pan on the stove, add in the cinnamon, then pour the whole lot over the figs.

Roast for about 15 minutes.  Serve with some thick double cream (Henry adds crushed cardamom seeds and a little icing sugar to hers) – a sprinkling of crushed pistachios would be gorgeous too.

Roast Figs, Sugar Snow: Food to Warm the Soul is available now, published by Octopus.

So first of all, I have to be honest, I’ve said no to coming on this show A LOT.  Luckily for me, I think Nick could see through my thin veneer of nonchalance to the terrified wobbling jelly within and just kept on asking until I said yes.

Originally I was going to do the Christmas show, but then it was all change and suddenly it was this Saturday.  I was overcome with a mixture of excitement, nerves and a bustling, Womble-like determination to get everything perfect.  It didn’t help when Nick mentioned that I was going to be the main guest on the show (oh, no pressure then…) and needed to devise a three course menu to bring into the studio for us all to eat.  We chatted around different themes… three courses for under a tenner?  Versatile family dishes?  But then got lost in a conversation about how the sauce for one of the dishes I’d planned to do (a spicy lamb meatball dish) could be used for lamb shanks, bolognese, soup… and the theme was there before us: frugal food.  Luckily, I would be joined by fellow food enthusiast Christian Carden-Maund, who would be bringing a main course and a dessert, and the amazingly clever Charles Bennett from Hanslope wines in Buckinghamshire who would be matching wines to our dishes.

I cooked everything on the Friday (dishes are warmed up in the kitchen at the studio so it was fine to bring everything cold) and arrived, stupidly early at the BBC Three Counties studio in Luton on Saturday morning.

Nick was, as ever, cool as a cucumber (I’ve known him for ages through his food blog/vlog, My Daddy Cooks) and very reassuring, as was the lovely producer, Emma.  When Christian and Charles arrived I felt even better as they were lovely – really friendly and chatty, and before I knew it, we were live!

Although I think my first couple of sentences were a bit nervous-sounding, actually I soon forgot I was in the studio as the wine flowed and we tasted and chatted about the various dishes.  Weirdly, all that kept popping up in my head was that my Mum was listening and that I mustn’t let her down by burping or swearing or anything.  It’s fascinating to see behind the scenes, and actually was quite hilarious during the news or a song to have to sprint up the stairs to the kitchen Benny Hill stylee to warm up the dishes, plate them up and bring them back to the studio, then settle into your chair and joining in the chat again as though you’d never left!.

Christian was a brilliant choice to talk about leftovers as he’s something of a leftover guru.  The dish he bought was a fabulous chicken in a sherry cream sauce with mushrooms, which was accompanied by a gorgeous caramelised onion mash – made with potato skins!:

Christian’s dessert was just fabulous – and his own creation – I’m going to ask him to guest blog about the dessert for us because it really is a perfect centrepiece for Christmas: a zesty, light creamy citrus take on a classic tiramisu.  Check out the fabulous caramel basket:

Charles’ wine matches were clever and perfect.  He chose a beautiful organic Argentinian Torrontés wine called Cuma (Michel Torino) to go with my spiced butternut squash soup (inspired by my homie Laura’s gorgeous butternut squash soup).  The generous amount of chilli that I’d added had initially worried me, but matched with the sweetness of the squash and this amazingly rounded white wine, the whole thing was perfect.

For the spicy lamb meatballs, Charles chose this lovely Carmenere (I love Carmenere anyway – Tesco Finest do a great one):

and to match my fudgy chocolate brownie, he went with an amazing dessert wine, which, incidentally he would recommend as a perfect accompaniment to Christmas pudding:

We were also joined by my fellow foodie blogger and online friend, Ren Behan, who does a segment on the show every week. It was lovely to finally meet her in person (plus her apple cake was to die for – I snaffled a couple of slices).

For all the recipes from the show, you can download the factsheet here

Nick Coffer’s Weekend Kitchen is live every Saturday on BBC Three Counties Radio. Thanks so much to Nick for inviting me and to Emma for being so lovely xx

If you want to listen to the show on BBC iPlayer, here’s the link 

So firstly, a disclaimer. A silly one, admittedly, but a disclaimer all the same: this cheesecake is made with low fat cream cheese. It is therefore slightly lower fat than normal cheesecake. However, it still weighs in at a stonking 500 kcal a slice (if you cut it into 8 – and yes, I did work it out – I took my shoes and socks off and everything) but basically if you’re on a diet, you’re not going to be eating cheesecake anyway, right? It just seems to me that if you don’t HAVE to use full fat stuff, you can shave a few grams of fat here and there.  If you want to shave it a bit more, you can use low-fat digestive biscuits and cream, and leave out the Maltesers.  But I’m not that organised.  And I like Maltesers.

Cooks like Nigella always insist that cheesecakes need full-fat cream cheese. Not true. The only difference I’ve noticed (and I’ve tested this intensively – I eat a lot of cheesecake) is that it does take slightly longer to set.  It’s not a baked cheesecake, so it’s got a very soft texture anyway, and if you’re making it for a dinner party, best make it in the morning or even the night before you need it. Just in case.  Also, if you’re worried about a soft set – stir in 200g melted chocolate (cooled to room temp) just before you pour the mix into the base – it will make the cheesecake even more chocolatey, plus it will help with the set.

Anyhoo, enough waffle.  You will need:

300g digestive biscuits

50g butter

70g Maltesers

500g low fat cream cheese

100g icing sugar

1 tsp vanilla

200ml whipping cream

30g Maltesers, crushed, to decorate.

So bash the hell out of the digestives with a rolling pin, then melt the butter (I do it in a jug in the microwave) and stir into the biscuit crumbs.  Add the 70g of Maltesers and press into the bottom of a large springform tin.  Pop into the fridge (the base, not you).

Now take the cream cheese, the icing sugar and the vanilla and mix it all up with a hand blender or in a food mixer.  Pour in the whipping cream and basically whip the bejaysus out of it.  You want the mixture really really thick and gloopy:

Pile the mixture onto the biscuit base and chill very well.

Before serving, crush more Maltesers and sprinkle them all over the top.  If you’re lucky, when you slice the cheesecake, you’ll cut through some of the Maltesers and it will look like you did this on purpose.  Clever, eh?

Oh and I’m going to enter this recipe into Reluctant Housedad‘s Recipe Shed. I like Keith.  He’s a great laugh on Twitter and his blog is honest, funny and – bonus – full of food!  I’m cheating slightly as the theme is cakes and bakes, but hey, cheesecake’s a cake, right?

Right?

I’ve always wanted an ice cream maker. It’s one of those things that’s been on my wanted list for absolutely ages. So when Cuisinart contacted me and said I could have anything from their range – ANYTHING?! – of course I chose this little beauty (although I must admit to being temporarily distracted by the Professional Waffle Iron and the Overstuffed Sandwich Maker first…):

As with all these gadgets, it’s big and yes, it takes up a lot of kitchen space, but our biggest problem was yet to come: the bowl.  You see, it turns out you have to fit the entire mixing bowl into the freezer to freeze overnight, or at least 12 hours.  But ours didn’t fit.  I was seriously considering approaching the man at the corner shop and asking him to pop it in with the Cornettos for an evening, but my Mum (at whose house we’re still squatting) eventually saved the day by removing a whole freezer drawer and squeezing that sucker in:

We looked up loads of recipes, but some had 8 egg yolks, and others had pints of cream, so we kind of bodged our own one together and it came out really well.  I honestly think you could get away with full-fat milk rather than the half and half cream/milk combo… I’ll give it a go and report back.

It’s basically just a custard recipe, so if you really wanted to, you could just buy a tub of ready made custard and churn that with some fresh berries or even a squeeze of chocolate sauce – easy peasy.

Here’s what we used:

10 large mint leaves (ours was spearmint)

300ml milk

300ml double cream

4 egg yolks

100g caster sugar

100g chopped chocolate (which was too much – 50g is plenty)

And for the method:

Whizz the mint leaves in the blender with the milk until they’ve all but disappeared.  You could also just steep the mint in the milk – you’d miss out on the lovely eau de nil colour of the finished product, admittedly.

Whisk the sugar and egg yolks together whilst gently heating the milk and cream in a saucepan.

When the milk/cream is just bubbling around the edges of the pan but not boiling, tip a little of it carefully into the yolk/sugar mixture, whisking all the time.  When you’ve poured about a third in, you can tip the yolky mixture back into the saucepan.

Now, it’s just a case of stirring your lovely minty green mixture gently until it thickens.  As with all egg custards, it won’t get really thick, but you’re looking for the thickness of double cream…

Then all you have to do is leave your mixture to cool until it’s room temperature, stirring it occasionally so no skin forms, and pop it into the ice cream machine where it churns happily for 20 minutes into lusciously creamy ice cream (you add the chocolate 5 minutes before the end).

If you don’t have this wondrous gadget, you can pop the mixture into the freezer, then just whip it out every hour and give it a whisk.  You should only have to do that twice, then you can cover and allow to freeze solid.

The verdict? 9/10, and it only dropped a point for the hassle of having to find freezer space to freeze the enormous bowl.  There was only a small paddle thing and the bowl to wash up, so no mess either.

The Cuisinart Ice Cream Deluxe (RRP £75) is available at good cook shops and also John Lewis, House of Fraser and Habitat to name but a few.

My Disreputable Dad is back from his holidays.  Bronzed and beautiful.

Two weeks in the south of France. They ate in the same restaurant every night.

‘Every night?’, I ask, incredulous.

‘Well yes’, he says, ‘except one.  Their steak frites was incredible.  We tried another restaurant for one night, but it wasn’t as good, so we went back to the original one’.

He’s a creature of habit, my father.

On my visit, we walked around his beautiful garden.  The plum trees are groaning with hard, green fruit.  A bumper crop.

And the apples got so heavy that they actually broke the bough of the tree.

I left with treasure of the appley variety.

Perfect for rustling up a simple apple crumble:

.

Apple Crumble

500g apple (weigh after peeling and coring)

Sugar for sweetening the fruit

175g plain flour

110g cold butter, cubed

110g golden caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees/gas 5.  Then just tumble the apples into a baking dish and sprinkle on a little sugar (these apples weren’t too sour, but taste one to judge how much sugar you’ll need to add).  If your apples are a bit ‘floury’ (like Bramleys can be sometimes), you might need to add a splash of water or fruit juice.

In a bowl, rub the butter into the flour gently with the ends of your fingers until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs.  Don’t make it too uniform – the odd lump of butter is nice.

Stir in the sugar.  If you like here you can add a handful of porridge oats, some nuts, orange zest, cinnamon… whatever you fancy.

Sprinkle over the fruit and bake for about 30 minutes until the fruit is tender and the top golden.

So thanks Dad.  I’ll be back when the plums ripen too.

Hope all you mummy-types out there are getting your feet massaged on the sofa and getting breakfast in bed, etc.

I saw this lovely recipe from Anjum Anand (I LOVE her – I think she’s actually got a new book coming out soon).  She was talking about the fact that she made this with her mum, and now makes it with her daughter, which is exactly how cooking should be.

It’s really difficult to find a dessert to go with Indian food, and this one sounds like it could be a winner.

Anjum says ‘carrot kheer is a light, cold pudding made only with milk, carrots, sugar and almonds but this deceptively simple sounding dessert is a most refreshing and flavourful end to a warm, savoury meal. It is my all time favourite Indian pudding and I would urge my mother to make this whenever she had people coming around, mainly in the spring and summer months. I would then get busy helping my mother in the kitchen, it wasn’t a particularly important job, peeling and grating the carrots, but I enjoyed cooking and felt important when my mother would tell her friends that I made it with her.’

What a perfect recipe for Mother’s Day. I’m determined to give it a go now.  Carrots for pudding, anyone?

Carrot Kheer

Serves 6

1 litre full-fat milk

250g carrots, peeled and grated

3–4 tbsp sugar

Good pinch of saffron strands

1⁄3–1⁄2 tsp green cardamom seeds, powdered

2 tbsp pistachios, chopped

2 tbsp flaked almonds, toasted

Caramelized pine nuts, to serve

Heat the milk in a wide, heavy-based saucepan, stirring and scraping the base with the spoon frequently to make sure the milk does not catch and burn. If you are standing at the cooker you can increase the heat and stir constantly, but if you are busy in the kitchen (please do not stray too far!) keep it on a low heat. Keep cooking until it reduces by about one third – this takes about 25 minutes depending on your pan and heat.

Add the carrots and continue cooking for another 15–25 minutes or until they are soft and the milk is as thick as you like it. This is a personal thing – I like it quite thin but others like it quite thick; you will need to keep up the stirring though. Stir in the sugar, saffron and cardamom powder, cook for another 2 minutes and taste for sweetness. Chilling any food dulls its sweetness, so you may need to add a little more than you would deem necessary. Cool and then place in the fridge, covered with clingfilm as milk absorbs flavours from other food in the fridge.

When ready to eat, serve in bowls sprinkled with the nuts.

As you know, it’s one of our slightly less mental traditions at English Towers that the birthday person gets to choose whatever they like for their birthday cake.  Usually, da brevren compete with each other to find the most complicated (The Mad Professor), chocolate-filled (the Death Wish Child), or retro (English Dad) recipes they can possibly find.  And then, of course, when it’s my birthday, I just make whatever I fancy.

This year turned out to be a bit different.  ‘I’m going to make your birthday cake’, said the Death Wish Child, confidently.  ‘What would you like?’.

‘Well’, said I, ‘what I would really really like is lemon meringue pie.  No, lime meringue pie, but don’t worry, I’ll help’.

‘Nope’, said the small confident one, while imaginary fireworks and laser beams went off behind him.  ‘*I* shall make the pie’.  So sit back and enjoy, while my wonderful offspring takes you through his birthday pie:

First you need a pastry bottom (although I suspect that I might already have one):

For the pastry, you’ll need:

200g cold butter

400g plain flour

Pinch salt

1tbsp caster sugar

1 egg yolk

4 or 5 tbsp cold water

Firstly, preheat the oven to 180/gas 4.  It’s easiest to do this in the food processor (the pastry, not the preheating. That would be silly. And anyway, you’d never fit the oven in there), but you can do it by hand if you’re not as lazy as us.

Chop your cold butter into squares and add it to the flour, salt and sugar.  Process it until it looks like breadcrumbs.

Now plop in the egg yolk and pulse slowly, adding tablespoonfuls of water until it just comes together.

Flour the work surface (and your trousers, and your mother, and the floor) and squish the mixture together into a ball.  Roll it out to about 5-6mm thick, then roll it onto your rolling pin and unroll over your flan dish or baking tin  (about 24cm should do it).  When it all breaks apart, swear a bit and kind of patch it together. Nobody will notice.  Push it in to the edges and trim the top.

Now to bake it blind: scrunch up a bit of greaseproof paper, then smooth it over the pastry and pour in some baking beans – you can use ceramic or whatever. I’ve got some old dried beans – for about 15 minutes.

Then take it out of the oven, remove the baking beans and put it back in to cook the bottom (ooer) for about another 5 minutes, then take it out and leave to cool.  Turn the oven down to gas 2/150 degrees.

Meanwhile, make the lime curd.  We use bottled lime juice in this house, but if you want to juice several limes, be my guest:

100g butter

6 tbsp lime juice (or for lemon curd, 2 lemons, zested then juiced)

150g caster sugar

2 eggs plus 1 extra yolk (keep the white for the meringue)

Take a saucepan and bung in the butter, juice, zest and caster sugar.  Melt it all together slowly until the sugar is all dissolved.

Meanwhile, in a bowl, whisk the eggs and yolk until well combined.  Now, take your warm, limey, butter mixture and gently pour a little bit into the egg, whisking all the time, then a bit more, then a bit more, until you’ve combined about half of it with the eggs.  Now bung that lot back into the saucepan and keep whisking and simmering until the mixture thickens.  Make sure there’s someone behind you at this point shouting ‘WHISK! WHISK FASTER!’.

Turn off the heat and leave to cool.  Remember to just stir it occasionally to keep it from getting a skin on.  When it’s about room temperature, pour it into the pastry case and pop into the fridge to cool.

Finally, for the meringue:

4 egg whites

225g caster sugar

Whisk the eggs in a very clean bowl until they form firm peaks, then keep whisking while you add the sugar, spoon by spoon, until it’s all incorporated and the meringue is thick and glossy.  Pile it all on top of the lemon curd and fluff it up a bit (or you can pipe it like my man here):

Bake in the very low oven (gas 2/150 degrees) for about 40 to 50 minutes, depending on how squelchy you like your meringue.   If it’s a Special Birthday Meringue Pie, you can decorate it and add candles.

Then sit down with some pink champagne and blow your candles out, wishing with all your heart that you get to spend every birthday just like this, with the people that you love.

Thanks, Charlie xxxx