Blackberry nectarine galette

A very quick pudding to use some of the deliciously juicy, plump blackberries from our garden, this uses ready-made puff pastry so is ridiculously quick to assemble after a long day at work.

Pistachio chocolate truffle-cookies

A lovely couple called Rhian and James commissioned me to make them a chocolate and pistachio wedding cake just like the one I’d made for my friend Sarah.  James also confessed that he is a complete addict when it comes to cookies, and so I made them a great big batch of chocolate and pistachio cookies to go with the cake.  I’d planned to use my trusty recipe for this, but having finally used up the mountains of ingredients in my kitchen for the cake, I mistakenly assumed that all the chocolate that was left was for the cookies – forgetting entirely that I still had to make a large amount of chocolate ganache for the cake. It seemed like an awful lot of chocolate as I stirred it into the cookie dough, and so when I re-checked my cookie recipe, I realised that I had actually used three times the amount of chocolate.  Rather than starting again straight away (which would’ve meant going shopping for more ingredients) I decided to bake the cookie dough I’d made and see if it worked – after all, what harm does extra chocolate do anything?  It was a mistake that paid off – these are without doubt, the best cookies I have ever made.  There is so much chocolate that they are almost held together by it – they become more like chocolate truffles with some cookie dough in – but they are unbelievably good.  The bride and groom emailed me after the wedding to say what a huge hit they had been and that they’d struggled to get James away from them.  Sometimes mistakes are the best form of invention!

Clotted cream tiramisu

Lu loves tiramisu and always orders it when we go to Italian restaurants, but I realised recently that for some reason I’ve never made it!  For her birthday, I decided to give it a try, but unfortunately couldn’t find any mascarpone at the shops.  Instead, I made it with clotted cream – and Lu says this was the best tiramisu she’s ever tasted, so for now on this will be how I always make it!