Recipe collections

Bread rolls with porridge base made of toasted oats and ale or stout. Definitely one of the all-time top 10 breads. The ale and the porridge base make them moist and they stay fresh for a good few days.

Almond cake with fresh raspberries, flavoured with cinnamon and lemon zest. It’s flourless, dairy and gluten free, yet wonderfully airy and soft.

Angel food cake is light as air, fatless and egg yolk-less. Egg whites whipped to a cloud, with only a whisper of flour and no baking powder, it bakes in a special tin with a chimney, or an ungreased ring tin. Best decorated with cream and berries!

Scones made with grated raw apple and cheddar cheese. So this is a quick, rewarding, minimum effort recipe for apple cheese scones. They spread, rather than rise skywards, which seems to be the effect of cheese content in pastry.

Apple and onion bread, it should really be called a bird feed loaf because the amount of seeds in it is staggering. At first I was going to reduce it – a full baking tray of toasted seeds going into one little loaf! But then I thought – trust Dan. His recipes do not fail.

Rustic apple galette with shortcrust pastry base and sliced raw apple filling. No blind baking, no precooking apples – and no soggy bottom!

German apple Kuchen with roasted apples and breadcrumb and nut topping. Kuchen, I recall, is what my Grandmother used to bake on Sundays, to be consumed, still warm, after lunch with a coffee.

Perfect apple pie with homemade pastry and apple and raisin filling. I have twisted the classic a little by making sweetened crust but if you use tart cooking apples and not a lot of sugar in the filling, it creates a nice balance.

Cheat's apple strudel with apple chunks and raisins wrapped in sweet tea bread dough. This is a cheat’s recipe. There’s no stretching and stretching and stretching and reading love letters through the dough involved.

The dough for these sweet apricot buns is very versatile. Try spreading it out, focaccia-style, in a baking tray and topping with fruit and crumble. Try putting lots of dried fruit on top, folding in half or rolling and baking into a strudel.

Buttery loaf cake with dried apricot chunks and generous crumble topping; it’s a winter version of the fruit crumble cake, and all the ingredients you should have in your pantry.

Apricot frangipane tart, fresh apricots on a frangipane layer, with Italian shortcrust pastry base. There are three recipes in this one. The tart base is made from pasta frôlla, the Italian equivalent to sable or shortcrust; not really very different but less flaky and crumbly than their Anglo-French brothers

Apricot upside-down butter cake. Just when I thought I've seen it all when it comes to cake batters, here comes this little number and what a lovely one it is. The texture is gorgeous, it's not hard to make and it keeps if you let it.

Asparagus tart on puff pastry, modestly cheesy but superiorly easy to make. It’s a delightful springtime brunch or lunch dish, making the most of the short British asparagus season while it lasts.

Savoury breakfast muffins with bacon, apple and cheese. I adopted this recipe from Nigel Slater who uses ham in his muffins. Say what you will, bacon always wins over ham at breakfast time and these things are meant for breakfast.

Bagels with poppy and sesame seeds - as good as in New York or Montreal. Anyone who knows a thing or two about bread, dough and things yeasty will work out that if you stick a bit of yeast dough into boiling water...

Baguettes made with white French type 55 flour, cold fermented overnight. The best thing for me about holidays in France is going to a boulangerie to get fresh baguettes, coming back proudly brandishing the crusty sticks, pretending I’m a proper French person.

Bakewell tart with a smudge of raspberry jam, soft and chewy frangipane filling, almondy crust and a cherry on top. Gorgeous textures and flavours in a classic English cake.

White chocolate banana blondie with chunks of brazil nut toffee. Banana blondie recipe from Dan Lepard’s Short and Sweet recipe book.

Banana bran muffins with raisins and cinnamon - perfect for breakfast. Most pastries can be frozen when baked and just cool and they will be good as fresh after an hour on the kitchen top. The only problem is they can never, ever win with the competition from a bacon butty…

Banana loaf cake with raisins. Not sure why some call it banana ‘bread’ – it’s cake all right, sweet and raisiny, and just to make double certain no one will cut a slice of it for a ham and cheese sarnie, I’ve glazed it with sticky honey and cream topping.

Banana and chocolate chip cake with olive oil, spices, molasses and dark brown sugar. Super easy recipe, no mixer needed for this banana chocolate chip cake.

Banana muffins with dried mango and pineapple chunks. This is a good cake mix – the best, the banana cake. I honestly can’t recall where the recipe comes from.

Banana scones made from just one overripe banana make excellent breakfast. Especially delightful toasted and buttered.

Basic sourdough bread made with ‘old dough’ or pâte fermentée. This method uses a reserved chunk of dough instead of a starter and it makes for a tasty, long lasting, flavoursome new sourdough loaf.

Basic white bread, a simple sandwich loaf made at home is miles better than any shop bought bread. Try it once, you’ll be converted.

Bazlama, Turkish flatbread enriched with yoghurt is not only tasty: it’s absolutely spectacular when it cooks on a hot griddle, inflating like a balloon!

Beetroot bread with grated raw beetroot, flavoured with caraway and studded with sunflower seeds and an occasional raisin. A proper loaf, good for slicing, toasting and sandwiches, with spectacular colour of the crumb and excellent, moist and chewy texture.

Beetroot leaf tart is a great way to use beetroot leaves. Never throw them away! Beet greens are nutritious and delicious, small young ones on baby beetroot can be used raw in salads.

Victorian Savoy cake, or biscuit de savoie, is the lightest butterless sponge cake. Fuller taste than angel food, more forgiving than genoise and far more sophisticated than Victoria sponge.

Crunchy biscuits with milk and white chocolate chip chunks. These chocolate chip biscuits are crispy rather than chewy, keep their shape and are excellent for dunking in coffee or tea.

Black bread flavoured with treacle and coloured with coffee. The apparently odd list of ingredients - rye, fennel seed, grated raw carrots - produces a very interesting loaf.

Caribbean Christmas black cake with rum soaked fruit and burnt sugar flavour. It is the Jamaican or Trinidad cousin of British Christmas cake and it stands tall in comparison!

Nigella’s black forest brownies, with sweet dried cherries soaked in kirsch or orange juice, is the brownie recipe you didn’t know you were missing.

Black forest gâteau, rich and dark chocolate base layered with pillows of cream swathing fresh, lightly roasted cherries. A luxurious idea for the next birthday or celebration bake.

Gluten free black hearted cookies with dark chocolate and brown sugar. There is an industrial quantity of chocolate in these cookies – and you can tell after just one bite.

Blood orange and olive oil cake with zest and chunks of orange in the mix. If you’d like to ice it, beat juice of half a blood orange into 80g icing sugar until smooth. Pour over the top of the cake and spread with a palette knife.

Blood orange muffins with poppy seeds and orange syrup drizzle. These muffins could well be made with ordinary oranges but for the pleasure of handling that lovely fruit, use blood. BLOOD. Not blush. Recipe courtesy Good Food Magazine.

Biscuits made with blue cheese and toasted oats. Unlike most cheese biscuits, these actually look HEALTHY. It might be because of the oats visible when you slice the pastry block – or the greenish tinge courtesy of blue cheese.

Blueberry and cream sponge cake is a magnificent dessert. Blueberry Victoria sponge, with layers of lightly roasted blueberries and whipped Chantilly cream is easy to make but very impressive to serve.

Blueberry, almond and lemon loaf cake by Ottolenghi with the sugar amount cut down a little by CuisineFiend. It’s still a masterpiece of a cake – all credit to Ottolenghi.

Blueberry buckle cake with wholemeal flour and quinoa and oats topping. That of course refers to the way the topping buckles on top of the fruit in a wavy manner. Very descriptive. I think I’ll adopt it now, especially that the blueberry kind is the most common buckle and that is my firm favourite.

Blueberry cookies, chewy and delicious, with fresh blueberries or bilberries (wild European blueberries), easy and quick to make as there’s no need to chill the dough.

Blueberry cornmeal shortbread tart from Alison Roman, slightly tweaked, is the best pie/tart/cobbler for the summer season. No soggy bottom!

Sweet focaccia-style tea bread topped with blueberries and crumble. Ordinarily, thinking focaccia will bring to mind an image of flat, thin bread decorated sparsely with whatever, preferably savoury, preferably olives.

Blueberry muffins. The best. The easiest. By all means use frozen berries in the bleak mid-winter. Better that than paying extortionate price of bluebs imported from Darkest Peru. And frozen ones are very well-behaved: they stir nicely into the mix, don’t go mushy like raspberries and retain their shapes.

Blueberry poppy seed cake, easier to make than a pie and delicious warm or cold. It is a pie of sorts or a tart, or flan, with the filling surrounded by a golden brown crust.

Blueberry upside down polenta cake. Polenta cake batter is so nice because of its crunch. And let's be honest: since anything with blueberries is gorgeous, so is this and I shouldn't have doubted it for a second.