I heart Hugh (he's bready brilliant)...

A little while ago my mothership sent me a pamphlet of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's breads and puddings from the Telegraph. Much as I dislike the tory press, their cookery booklets are not to be argued with and this one has proved (hur, hur) a gem. I'm about to tell you about three recipes from it.

First off, his basic bread recipe. I actually looking at the kneading diagrams for this, and stretched my way into some of the lightest loaves ever to come from my hands. 

I love bagels, they are one of my favourite things to eat of a weekend morning, and the fact that the dough needed poaching was intriguing enough to inspire me to have a go. The steps are thus: mix (quite a dry dough, presumably that is because they are soaked through in the pan of  water), knead, prove, shape, prove and then BOIL. I shaped the ring-doughnut shape pushing a hole in the middle and then stretching, rather than Hugh's way of rolling a sausage shape and then sticking together, because, as he even admits to in the recipe, they can come apart in the water if made like that. Poaching them (one minute each side, and I timed it) was fun, not least because they smelled amazing. Once out of the water, glaze with egg (I left some glazed, topped some with sesame seeds and others with Malden Salt and black pepper). Brilliant, I am now a bread genius, these were delicious--despite every one being a slightly different size!

Finally: brown bread ice-cream. When I first heard of this a few years ago, I assumed it was some hideous high fibre version of my favourite food. Not so--the bread is toasted in the oven with lots of sugar, the ice-cream itself is made from a custard base, with no fibre in sight, just lots of cream, sugar, whole milk and egg yolks. the toasty bits are mixed in as the mix is firming up in the ice-cream maker. I really enjoyed this, it tasted like premium ice-cream, and the bread was sort of caramelised and, although its flavour was distinctly recognisable, it worked.

Tinker Tailor Sorbet Pie

I hope you will forgive the trial of a third focaccia recipe this week--in an effort to become a Jack of all trades and master of one, I have given myself focaccia to try and work on in this project. The other recipes, I can assure you, are all completely new to me.

 This week I had a theme: literary food. I put out a call for this on Twitter and N came up with the Lamb Shank Redemption and, between us, Tinker, Tailor, Sorbet, Pie. (Actually, I meant food which had appeared in books, such as Proust's madeleines--but N's ideas made me laugh, so I was game.) I'm not really a fan of Nigel Slater's shows--the faux notes on notice boards reminding him to cook for a fisherman he probably met at a production meeting two weeks ago being one good reason for this--but he does produce recipes that work. He came up with Lamb Shank with anchovy last week on his new series, which I nicked and applied our much more fun title to.

The butcher had sold out of lamb shanks, so it had to be the Lamb Shoulder Redemption. I scaled up the recipe for five. The anchovies merely flavour the sauce in which you braise it, so you don't end up with fishy meat. It's extremely easy, produces lamb so tender that you can cut it with a spoon, and--even though I hit the white wine before I'd finished cooking and therefore the sauce was somewhat thinner than I might have wanted, and the parsley stayed in the fridge and never made it into it--it still elicited these words from H when she was polishing it off: 'I'm a bit sad my dinner's ending'. I served it with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's foccacia. This is less messy than Paul Hollywood's version, and more authentic than the recipe I tried a few months ago. However, Paul Hollywood's recipe, despite the fact that my kitchen table was resurfaced in sticky, sticky dough, wins on taste. (Hugh F-W's is much easier to make when you're doing other things, like cooking the rest of dinner.)

And finally: Tinker, Tailor, Sorbet, Pie, or Baked Alaska. As plums were in season, I went for a plum middle, and made the following: sorbet. Which I then spooned into a large novelty coffee cup (lined with cling film so I could get it back out) and froze for an hour. While the sorbet was freezing in its 'mould' I chilled an all-in-one, two-egg sponge cake in the fridge (I'd made it whilst the ice-cream worker was doing its work). The trick to a Baked Alaska is to keep everything really cold till the eleventh hour, so I lifted the sorbet out of the cup after an hour, turned it upside down to make a dome, put it on the cake, covered the whole lot in more cling film, and stuck it in the freezer for three more hours. When it came to nail-biting cooking time (and I admit at this point I wasn't at all sure it would work: images of weeping meringue and melting sorbet haunted me all day, and there was some back-up Ben and Jerry's in the freezer) I whipped up the meringue from this recipe from Waitrose, quickly took the sponge and sorbet out of the freezer, smeared the meringue on, stuffed it on the oven as fast as I could, and started praying!

I'm afraid I only took this after we had eaten the rest--hence melting!

This was the best dessert I have made all year. The sorbet was fruity and sharp (and, praise be, frozen), the meringue did not weep and was crispy and fluffy and you could taste the cake was home made. I am blowing my own trumpet, but this was a day on which I made sorbet, cake, and meringue for one dish, so I feel as though I deserve it!