La Recette du Jour

This makes a nice change from a traditional crumble mix. It would be nice with apricots or peaches too.

I've always liked the combination of apricots and almonds, and this is a quick and easy alternative to the more labour-intensive tarte bourdaloue.

A quick dessert, based on a medieval recipe.

Elegant, delicious, and reminiscent of Pacific islands.

Serves 4.

The second year we had our garden we had a fine crop of guignes (wild cherries) which we used to make guignolet, an aperitif made from cherries and rosé wine, with added alcohol and sugar. It's a bit sweet for our tastes, and five years later, we still have a stash of bottles under the stairs and need to find ways of using them up. Here's a good one, rather similar to Cherries Jubilee.

If you don't have guignolet available, you'll just have to use your imagination -- maybe Dubonnet would be a good substitute.

Quick and easy to do when you have a glut of peaches.

You must make the prunes at least a week and preferably a month beforehand. Do plenty ... they are very moreish! (and they should keep for months anyway).

If you want to be less wicked, replace up to half the cream with milk - I did, with no ill effect on the final result.

Easy to make, tastes good and looks elegant. What more can you ask? Serves 6.

You can vary the fruit in this recipe, but it must include raspberries and an orange to provide some acidity, and preferably strawberries. It would be nice to include stoned cherries or red/blackcurrants if in season.

This recipe has apparently been on the menu at The Ivy since it opened in 1981. Simple to prepare, and terribly naughty. Just tell yourself it's one of your "five portions a day". This quantity serves about 4.

Here is the most chocolatey dessert you are ever likely to eat. You must use the best dark chocolate you can get - ideally Valrhona, but Green and Black's or Waitrose own brand are good as well. It can be prepared entirely in the microwave, on a low setting.

Smart enough to serve at a dinner party, and absurdly quick and easy to make. The name literally means "Half- cooked chocolate cakes". You will need some muffin tins, individual dariole moulds, or similar. This quantity will make 4-6 cakes, depending on the size of the tins.

Original recipe by Aldo Zilli. Serve with a coulis of raspberries or mixed red fruit or, if calories and cholesterol are no object, with butterscotch sauce.

Instead of buying ready-made cream desserts from the supermarket, make these instead -- they take only minutes to do and are much nicer.

This turned out to be an excellent way of turning a tasteless supermarket-bought pineapple into something juicy and full of flavour. It looks lovely as well: a glossy circle of golden, glistening slices of pineapple tinged with brown.

A sumptuous and extravagant tart courtesy of Marco Pierre White. It may not sound exciting but it really is delectable.

The French magazine where I found this recipe described it as "trifle" -- it's not much like British trifle, but it's light, refreshing, and a bit less calorie-laden! Serve in tall straight glasses.

Fermented milk is available in supermarkets in France -- I haven't seen it elswhere, but it's rather like very thin yogurt. Maybe buttermilk would do, or even Actimel).

Serves 4. Assemble no more than half an hour before eating, or the meringues will go soggy.

A wonderful pudding from Jane Grigson -- if I had to name my favourite pudding ever, this would be it, and virtually every guest who's ever tried it has had seconds and begged for the recipe. One of the good things about it is that it doesn't matter if the sponge is a bit heavy; as long as the pears are good and caramelised it will be simply wonderful! It also doesn't matter if the pears aren't very tasty.

A good way of using melons that are not as tasty as they might be. We use the local Charentais melons (which are wonderful), but you could use any sweet melon (ideally with orange flesh, because it looks nice).

A classic French dessert, and this version is absolutely divine. The method for the pastry is unusual, to say the least, but it produces a nice crisp, biscuity pastry which is ideal for this type of tart, as well as for fruit tarts. The quantity given will make three tart shells, but you can keep it in the fridge for a few days, or freeze it. See the recipe for prune and Armagnac tart for another excellent way of using it.

The filling is based on a Delia Smith recipe. I wasn't sure about the cream, but it creates a lovely balance between creaminess and the sharpness of the lemon. Well worth repeating.

There seems to be a great mystique surrounding Tarte Tatin but it really isn't difficult to do. After all, the original Tatin was allegedly an accident! Credit for this version: the ever-reliable Mireille Johnston

The best implement to cook it in is a heavy frying pan (preferably non-stick) that will go in the oven. But if you don't have a suitable one, you can cook the apples in a frying pan, then tip them into a cake tin and cover with pastry.

Note: I often just buy ready-made pastry for this rather than making it.

The original is a Nigel Slater recipe, considerably modified by me to suit local circumstances.

We used pain d'épices, which is a kind of gingerbread, for this. It makes a nice change from a classic tiramisu. Makes four generous helpings, or six daintier ones.

... inspired by a recipe for white chocolate and lime mousse. The flavours complement each other surprisingly well. Use good-quality chocolate with a high proportion of cocoa butter (i.e. 25%), not the Milky-Bar type which won't melt properly.

This is a great dessert to follow a substantial one-pot meal (such as couscous, for example). In addition it's healthy, low-fat, easy to do, and is prepared entirely in advance. What's not to like?

Wow, my first attempt at a blog competition: Hay, Hay, it's cheesecake all the way, courtesy of Peabody. Also my first attempt at food photography; ah well, I can only improve!

I often find cheesecake too sickly, but this one is light and delicious, and went down a storm for tea after choir rehearsal. As a bonus, it's very easy to make, and an excellent way of using up home-made lemon curd. Ideally, make it the day before and chill overnight.

Just catching up with the backlog of recipes held elsewhere and not entered here yet. This is yet another Kaliyoga one. Tiny tartlets make lovely petits fours with coffee. Left-over poached plums can be eaten on their own, with cream, ice cream -- or mascarpone of course.

It seems a terrible oversight that I do not yet have an entry for ile flottante, my favourite French nursery dessert. This is ace home cook Louisette's way of doing it. This is one large island -- the spoon-sized blobs of egg white floating in a sea of custard are oeufs à la neige. Ile flottante is easier to get right in my opinion, and certainly more manageable when cooking for a crowd.

From Good Housekeeping; a lot of work, but worth it for a special occasion, and you can make the cake ahead and freeze it. I think you could use lime instead of orange; I love the combination of lime and white chocolate.

This makes a very large cake -- at least a dozen servings. Reduce by half for a 15-cm tin; baking time will be the same.

Early-season strawberries are often pretty tasteless, but sometimes you just can't resist buying them because they remind you that spring is here. Usually I brighten up dull strawberries by halving them and marinating with a little sugar and a splash of Carthagène or Muscat for a few hours; this really brings out what flavour they have. I've also been known to use black pepper and balsamic vinegar. Today I found another way of enhancing them which made a very nice change.

Once the HHDD cheesecake competition was over, Peabody posted her own cheesecake recipe with some mouthwatering photos. Once more I needed to cook something for supper after choir rehearsal so I ran out and bought some cream cheese right away.

Peabody's recipe uses American cup measures and she also has a bigger tin than I do, so before I started I converted it to metric and shrank it by a quarter to fit my 8 1/2 inch / 22 cm springform tin. Then I made various other adjustments along the way. Verdict: success -- it even looked almost as gorgeous as Peabody's! I won't repeat the method here, as you can find it at Culinary Concoctions, but here's my heavily annotated ingredient list in metric measurements.

I was reminded of this today by someone mentioning "impossible pies" -- an all in one mixture that produces crust, filling and sauce "by magic". I love lemon-flavoured dishes, and lemon surprise is one of my favourite classic desserts, known since childhood -- mix everything together and get a light sponge floating on top of a lemony sauce when it comes out of the oven. My version is even low-fat!

I'm mainly recording this for the biscuits, which are light and crumbly and would make a nice base for other desserts. The dough must either be left in the fridge for several hours or put in the freezer for a couple of hours once made, because it's too sticky to work with otherwise.

While I'm on the subject of petits pots, this is a ridiculously simple and delicious idea from Nigel Slater. An excellent opportunity to use up some home-made yogurt and lemon curd.

A delicious, homely dessert from Michelin-starred chef Marc Meneau, via Simon Hopkinson. It requires 4 different preparations, but you can make custard and caramel sauce in advance, and even fry the apples, leaving only the bread to do at the last minute.

If you can't be bothered to make custard, I'm sure it would be lovely with a scoop of good-quality ice cream (vanilla or maybe even cinnamon). Serves 4. Calories: about a million per serving.

As part of an effort to cut down on dairy products, I have been experimenting with almond milk (I tried soya milk and it was disgusting). Almond milk is nice on cereal, and thanks to the recipe on the side of the carton, I find it makes very good clafoutis too; since most soft fruit goes well with almonds,, it's actually an enhancement. Make it with any soft fruit you like: apricots, cherries, apples, pears, plums, blueberries ...

I can claim no credit for this; I picked it up on delicious:days, one of the best foodie weblogs I know. I followed the recipe exactly, so there is no need to reproduce it here. I made the jelly firmer than I normally would, so it would cube nicely and hold together for the photos. It makes a cute after-dinner "drink"; I'd serve it with either a blob of sweetened whipped cream or a small scoop of vanilla ice cream.

I adapted this recipe from an articie on low-cholesterol food in BBC Good Food magazine. Despite being virtuously fat-free, it is surprisingly nice. I love pears with ginger, and chocolate and ginger are good too, so it seemed like a no-brainer to add ginger to the recipe. I expect it would be even better with cream poured over it, but then the "low-fat" label would be gone!

It's best eaten warm, but let it stand for 10 minutes after removing from the oven so that the pears aren't scaldingly hot.

I've always been a fan of anything lemon-flavoured, but I seem to have been going overboard lately. Every time I go to the supermarket they have piles of lovely firm untreated lemons, and I can't resist them.

This originated as a recipe in Sainsbury's magazine. Having just made some limoncello I had to try it. An additional motive was the hope of finding a form of jelly I can serve to French people without them going "eeeeew! Jelly!!" (le jelly invariably comes up immediately after "they boil everything to death" when you ask French people what they think of British food).

I think I have a winner here, the jelly cunningly concealed under layers of lemony custard and syllabub, the whole intensely lemony. The original recipe suggests folding broken-up bought meringues into the cream topping. Yes, it does need something crunchy, but I think meringues are the wrong thing. When you've made the custard, you will have five egg whites left over; use them to make tuiles to serve with the trifles. They look very pretty served in individual glasses; this makes 6 200 ml trifles.

It might look like a faff, but you can/must make the jelly and custard the day before serving (and the tuiles if making), and then assemble everything up to a couple of hours before the meal. The syllabub topping is better if left to stand for a couple of hours for the flavour to mature.

I happened across a food blog event called Taste and Create in which food bloggers are paired up and cook something from each other's blogs. It sounded like fun, so I signed up. I was a teeny bit alarmed when I saw who I'd been paired with: Megan is obviously a baker who specialises in fancy cakes, which are not my forte at all. I was worried I wouldn't find anything I thought myself capable of cooking, but luckily I quickly found ricotta pound cake, which looked like the sort of cake I make to take to choir practice and doesn't involve fondant icing. I briefly toyed with the chocolate cupcakes, but they involved piping bags and I just didn't see myself with a piping bag; I think I've probably used one about once in my entire life, and that was for making Duchesse potatoes.

Next challenge: the American cup measures. Gah! I hate these! How do you measure a cup of butter?? Off to Google, and I found this handy calculator, instantly bookmarked.

So off to the kitchen with the scales and a measuring jug. Now I have to confess that even after I'd done the conversions I fiddled with the recipe. 340 grams of sugar to 170 g of flour?? Pound cakes normally have equal weights of egg, butter, sugar and flour, and I'm sure most Americans have a sweeter tooth than I do, so I reduced the sugar to "only" 200 g. This might have something to do with the fact that my cake took even longer than Megan's to cook, and was very moist -- er, soggy even. But it had a lovely crisp, caramelised outside which contrasted nicely with the golden yellow interior. It's a "pudding" sort of cake; it would be nice with some soft fruit such as raspberries or blueberries, or even as the basis of a trifle.

So I'm not disappointed with my choice. Maybe I should put more sugar in next time though. The quantities below are what I actually used after my measuring/weighing/converting session; if you want the real recipe, I recommend visiting Megan's blog!

Our 25th wedding anniversary, and Steve's birthday: how to resist a recipe called verrines passion, passion verrines? I love making dainty desserts in glasses too. So I launched myself into Mercotte's complicated-looking recipe. Truth to tell, it wasn't that difficult, and you can do much of it in advance.

One word of warning: I messed up the tuiles by miscalculating the amount of butter. They ended up chewy instead of crisp, so I zapped them in the oven after cutting them out, hence they were dark brown instead of golden like Mercotte's. They are delicious though; the lemon and cardamom work really well. I'll definitely do them again, and get them right next time. I couldn't get any passion fruit juice or pulp either, so I made do with mixed tropical fruit juice for the jelly.

There are four elements: the tuiles, the caramelised almonds, the jelly and the cream. All can be made the day before, except perhaps the cream, and you can assemble them a few hours before the meal, then keep in the fridge.

This serves two, but you'll have some almonds and tuiles left over. Tant pis!

It's apricot time again, the season for another crate of apricots from Julien's orchard, now officially organic. His first crop was ruined by hail, so mine are from the second, large deep gold fruits with a rosy tinge. I confess I still have lots of jam left from last year, and even a jar of apricots in vodka, so I only took 5 kg this time. Some of them were halved, stoned, and went straight into the freezer between layers of greaseproof paper. Some made yet more jam, and others were simply eaten. That left me with about a dozen, and looking for recipes I happened across Loulou's clafoutis. I already have several clafoutis recipes, but Loulou's looked so tempting I just had to try it.

On closer inspection I was a bit worried by the oven temperature of 220C -- I thought the eggs would curdle. So I did it at 200, but actually there is enough flour in it to prevent curdling, so I will do it at a higher temperature next time. This time, I just cooked it for longer.

We usually eat clafoutis warm or cold, but Loulou recommends letting it cool completely, and she's right; it was good warm, but the leftovers were even better straight from the fridge this evening.

Like Loulou, I urge you to cook clafoutis; it's so easy, and works with nearly any fruit, so you can do it all the year round, even with prunes in winter! Vary the flavourings according to the fruit -- for example cinnamon with apples, or almonds with pears.