Olivia Potts

If, like me, you’ve watched every episode of the Great British Bake Off (twice), all the professional series, Junior Bake Off, and the celebrity charity episodes, you might need to look further afield for your next fix of television baking competitions. Fear not, because the GBBO franchise is wide-reaching: the format has been sold in 20 territories, and I have found myself hooked on the French offering: Le Meilleur Pâtissier (‘The Best Baker’). At first glance, it appears identical to the British version. In a tent, bedecked with bunting, a bunch of amateur bakers are collected together at pastel-hued baking benches.

It used to drive me mad that, whenever my husband and I would go out for dinner, no matter how fancy or lowbrow the place, he would always ignore the puddings on offer in favour of a single scoop of ice cream. He can overlook crème brûlées, lemon meringue tarts, sticky toffee puddings – even eschew a cheese plate – if ice cream is a possibility. It just always seemed quite a boring choice to me – you can keep a tub of ice cream in your own freezer, or maybe get a cone on the beach. Why would you plump for something so simple (so boring!) when there were so many more exciting options? Of course, as is so often the case, I was wrong.

There’s no getting away from the fact that potatoes dauphinoises is a rich dish. It’s a celebration of richness, of creaminess, and of carbs. If you recoil from richness, or are the first person at the table to bring up calorie counts, potatoes dauphinoises is probably not the dish for you – and frankly, any attempts to lighten it, or slim it down are misguided. But if you can resist bronzed slabs of thin, tender, perfectly cooked potato, with a garlic-infused creamy sauce bubbling up around the edges, you’re made of sterner stuff than I am. Dauphinoises hails from the historical Dauphiné region in South-East France; the region dissolved in 1789 but its potato namesake has lived on.

I often think (and write) about how much faith baking requires. Every time you entrust a batter, a dough or a sponge to the oven, there’s little you can do to change its fate. Sure, you can make sure you don’t open the oven dough (don’t open the oven door!), you can double check your temperatures and timings, but really, it’s a waiting game. Hoping, trusting that the cake or the bread or the pastry will have risen, turned golden, or crisped. Cooking is different: in general, you can fiddle when you’re cooking. You can taste, and add, and adjust. Cooking isn’t a done deal until you serve the finished dish, and you can lift the lid, remove from the oven, season and stir to your heart’s content without any detrimental effect.

As I write this, I am wearing a thick jumper and sitting under a blanket, having just put the heating on. Earlier, rain fell on our skylight so heavily, the dog jumped up as if we were being invaded. I changed my schedule this morning so I could bake, just to take advantage of the oven’s warmth. It certainly doesn’t feel like sunny days are in our near future. I’ve read that the last year has felt warped time-wise, that it’s been hard to form memories that stick in the usual way, because we don’t have the events, the change in daily routine, the hooks onto which we peg our days, our weeks, our minds.

The rum baba sits somewhere between a cake and a pudding: made from an enriched, yeasted dough, full of butter, called savarin, which is like a very dry brioche. It isn’t quite as enriched as brioche and, after baking, it can be left to stale, and dry out further, which means that when it’s soaked in the sweet boozy syrup, it will drink up even more. Savarin dough can be used to make enormous bundt cakes, often decorated with fresh cream and fruit, but I have a soft spot for the individual baba. Once soaked, they are squidgy and extremely alcoholic – put it this way, I wouldn’t want to drive after eating one.

Cinnamon rolls never used to grace my breakfast table. First of all, they struck me as the sweetness equivalent of drinking a triple espresso first thing: it might seem like a good idea at the time, but the crash that accompanies it is surely inevitable. And secondly, I was certain that to be the sort of person who can put cinnamon rolls on the table at breakfast time, you must be immensely practical, organised and competent – and tied to the kitchen. And that’s simply not me. Happily, neither of these things are true. While cinnamon rolls are sweet – if you don’t have at least a little bit of a sweet tooth, I’d probably stick to marmite on toast – they’re not the one-note sweetness I had assumed they were.

If you’ve heard a story about puttanesca it is likely that it translates as whore’s spaghetti – that it was born in the brothels of Naples’ Spanish quarters, a favourite of the prostitutes who worked there, for its quick, cheap and easy nature. But – ah, isn’t it always the way? – the truth is perhaps a little more prosaic. The word puttanesca is indeed derived from the Italian for prostitute (‘puttana’), but the same word is also used as a catch-all profanity, an Italian ‘crap’. In this vein, the dish would come to mean ‘any old crap’ pasta. This makes sense, because puttanesca is a true store-cupboard dish, made almost entirely from tins and jars and dried pasta (entirely if you forgo the parsley).

Eggs benedict is, I think, the perfect brunch dish. It combines the best bits of breakfast – eggs, some kind of pig product, a good sauce and bread – with sufficient elegance and composure that it doesn’t feel weird to be eating it after 10am. Although it is the balance of the individual components that make it such a successful dish, that hasn’t stopped restaurants and chefs the world over creating a host of variations. Swap the ham for smoked salmon to turn it into Eggs Royale, or spinach for Eggs Florentine.

I unironically love Easter eggs. I love the posh, fancy ones, the high street ones, the budget ones. From the sublime to the ridiculous, I have time and space in my heart for all of them. My husband is sick of hearing my grand theory that Easter egg chocolate is, in fact, the best of all chocolate, probably because the theory really only extends to the fact that Easter egg chocolate is thinner and snappier than that of chocolate bars. When it comes to trends this year, we’re seeing more Russian doll-style eggs (which rose in popularity last year), which as well as being visually impressive mean a variety of flavours of chocolate within one egg.

When it comes to cooking, I make no secret of the fact that I’m something of a traditionalist: I like old-fashioned steamed puddings, I like the classic and the heritage. I like blancmange and rice pudding and suet. I am unashamedly unfashionable. I’m not sure whether I chose the Vintage Chef recipe writing life, or whether the Vintage Chef recipe writing life chose me. I just don’t see the point in reinventing the wheel, or injecting unusual flavours and twists just for the sake of it. But, as I look back through recipes I’ve written, Easter has always been my exception: hot cross bun ice cream sandwiches, hot cross bun bread and butter pudding, cakes topped with mini eggs.

We are lucky to live in an age of domestic culinary convenience: whatever your heart desires, there’s an appliance, gizmo or specific spoon for it. Want to make cakes in the shape of a shoe? Not a problem. Need twenty different ways to crush garlic? Your needs can be met. Looking for a boiled egg, but in the shape of a square? Or a teddy bear, or a duck? Easy, you can make all three. So it seems remarkable that when it comes to effective gadgets or assistance for something as popular as pizza, we’re high and dry. It seems virtually impossible to get your hands on something that will help you replicate the thin, crisp crusted Italian-style pizza at home for anything other than seriously big money.

I don’t often find myself longing for the industrial rigours of a factory when I’m baking in my kitchen at home. But as I patted the squiggle of fig paste with wet hands, corralling it into a rough sausage shape I thought ruefully of Charles Roser of Philadelphia and his patent for a fig roll machine. In the late nineteenth century, poor digestion was thought to be the cause of a number of wider ailments and, as with breakfast cereal, biscuits were seen as an aid to digestion – and figs, of course, were a particularly digestion-friendly fruit. Brought over from Britain to America, the fig roll tended to be made by hand in small batches.

I am an unapologetic pudding pusher. Now, by pudding, I don’t simply mean that more people should eat dessert – although I do think we might feel a little more sweetly-disposed towards others if that were the case – but the peculiarly British tradition of steamed sponge puddings. Once terribly popular, now they are criminally underrepresented in the pudding canon. But for me, they are king. Far from their reputation of being dense or heavy – stodgy – proper steamed puddings are airy, fluffy, by far lighter than most cake sponges.