But thanks to my introduction to banana bread in Australia, those spotty old fruits finally have a use. This recipe uses four of the buggers, and a little kick of rum for background flavour.

Ingredients

4 medium sized ripe bananas (spotty with soft flesh)

250g plain white flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

250g golden caster sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

125g unsalted butter

2 eggs

2 tablespoons dark rum

Method

First up, set your oven set to 175 c and then grease a medium sized (19 x 11 cm) loaf tin with unsalted butter.

Now peel the bananas, discarding any strips of skin, and mash them up in a large bowl until pulped. Mix the butter into the bananas, ensuring it is warm and soft before you do. Next mix in the sugar, vanilla extract, rum and two lightly beaten eggs. You’ll be left with a lumpy, slightly odd looking mixture.

Place a sieve over the bowl and sift the flour and baking powder into it. Stir in gently, being careful not to over mix it, and then pour the batter into the loaf tin.

Pop into the oven, and cook for an hour and fifteen minutes. The reason for the long cooking time is that the mixture is rather wet. This also means that when the loaf is done, the outside will be a pretty dark brown, looking almost burned. Don’t be alarmed, this is how it should be.

After the hour and fifteen, take the tin out, and run a knife into the centre of the loaf. If it comes out clean, it’s ready. If not, pop it back in the oven for another 10 minutes.

If done, leave the banana bread in the tin on one side for 10 minutes or so, and then turn out onto a wire rack to cool. The loaf will sink a bit during cooling, and firm up so it slices better.

The Aussies like to eat if for breakfast toasted and sliced with ricotta, but you can eat it at any time of the day really. I prefer it with just some butter, or maybe a bit of Marscapone.

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I’ve learned quite a lot from my mother in cooking terms over the years. For the most part its been a case of me picking up stuff by watching her at work, but every now and then I’ll steal a recipe or two off her too.

This cake is one of those firm family favourites, and it even gets the royal seal of approval from my very sweet, but ever so fussy niece, Ksenia. It’s a bit tangier than most lemon drizzle cakes because of there’s more lemon juice in the glaze, and that’s how we like it.

Ingredients

For the cake

125g unsalted butter

175g self-raising flour

175g caster sugar

2 large eggs

Zest of 2 lemons

4 tablespoons of milk

A pinch of salt

Butter for greasing your loaf tin

For the ‘drizzle’

The juice of 2 lemons (about 6 tablespoons)

Zest of 1 lemon

100g icing sugar

Method

You’re going to bake this cake in a loaf tin, so first up, prepare and line it. Use a half kilo tin, smear it with butter, and then line with greaseproof paper. Now set your oven to 180 c to get it up to cooking temp.

Now cream together the butter and the sugar in a large mixing bowl; it makes life a whole lot easier, and the process faster if your butter is at room temperature. Creaming basically means beating the butter and the sugar together until it attains a ‘creamy’ texture. You can do this with a wooden spoon, but a hand whisk will save your arms.

Next add the two eggs and the lemon zest and beat them well into the butter and sugar mixture. Now fold in the flour and the salt. You want to mix in all the flour, but you don’t want to beat the hell out of the mixture, so do it gently with a spatula or something similar. Finally mix in the milk, which loosens the mixture a tad.

Pour the mixture into the loaf tin, shake from side to side so it levels out, and then pop onto the middle shelf of the oven. The cake is going to cook for around 45 minutes. When ready it will have risen, and the outside will be a dark golden brown.

When the cake is almost ready, make the drizzle. Put the lemon juice, icing sugar and zest into a small saucepan and heat until the sugar has dissolved. The syrup shouldn’t boil, but will be hot.

When you think the cake is ready, slide a sharp knife into the centre. If it comes out clean, it’s ready to come out, if not put it back in for another 4 or 5 minutes. As soon as you’ve taken the cake out of the oven, perforate it’s surface all over with a toothpick by sticking it in about half way. You’re doing this to help the syrup sink into the sponge whilst it’s still warm, and it’s well worth taking the time to make sure the top is properly peppered with holes.

Now pour the drizzle all over the top, trying to make sure it is absorbed evenly. The cake will have risen more at the centre so the syrup will naturally run towards the edges, so make sure you keep spooning it over the middle.

Now the hard bit, you have to wait until the cake is completely cooled before cutting it or it will crumble. When it is finally ready to eat, serve with a nice cuppa, or as a pudding with some Greek yoghurt ever so slightly sweetened with maple syrup or honey.

The final course of our valentines meal was a lemon posset with heart shaped shortbread biscuits (forgive the cheese).

The Posset is pretty much as old school as it gets with roots in 12th century England where it was drunk for it’s medicinal properties. I’m not sure this recipe could ever be described as good for you, cream and sugar tend to be frowned upon these days, but it is delicious, and very easy to make.

Ingredients

For the Posset

300ml double cream

75g caster sugar

1 lemon zested and juiced

For the shortbread

45g icing sugar

90g plain flour

30g cornflour

15g ground almonds

125g butter

Lemon zest

Golden caster sugar

Method

First up, put the cream and sugar in a pan and bring to the boil. Simmer for 3 minutes, making sure it doesn’t boil over, and then take off the heat. Allow to cool to room temperature, add the lemon juice and then whisk. Divide the mixture by pouring into two glasses and then put in the fridge to set.

Now make the shortbread biscuits. Sift the flour, cornflour and icing sugar into a food processor and then add the ground almonds. Cut the butter into cubes, add to the processor bowl, and then pulse until the butter has been blitzed, leaving you with a breadcrumb like mixture.

Tip the mixture out onto lightly floured surface, and bring it all together to form a smooth dough. Wrap in clingfilm, put in the fridge and set your oven to 180 degrees C.

When the oven is up to temperature, remove the dough, and using a lightly floured rolling pin, roll it out to around half a centimetre thick. Using a pastry cutter, cut out the dough and place on grease proof paper on a flat baking tray. Grate a little lemon zest and sprinkle each biscuit with a little golden caster sugar before popping in the oven for around 10 minutes.

The biscuits are ready when they are a pale yellow in colour and golden brown around the edges. Remove from the baking tray and cool on a rack. The biscuits will be soft and brittle, so be careful.

Remove the posset from the fridge to warm it up a little, and then serve with a couple of the cooled shortbread biscuits.A class act.

It was Valentines Day at the weekend, and as Hand To Mouth got engaged at New Years, I thought I’d better make a bit of an effort. Not being a fan of going to restaurants on VDay (always disappointing) I whipped up a three course feast fit for the future Mrs HTM. The menu:

Salt & Pepper Squid

Baked Cod & Leeks

Lemon Posset with Lemon & Almond Shortbread

I’m going to do a post per course as I don’t have the time to do them all at once, so first up our starter, Salt & Pepper Squid. If you can’t get hold of Szechuan peppercorns, just use 3/4 of a tablespoon of black peppercorns instead.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon Szechuan peppercorns, ground

1 teaspoon chilli flakes

1 tablespoon sea salt flakes

4 tablespoons plain flour

4 tablespoon corn flour

2 squid cleaned

1 large red chilli

2 spring onions

Rapeseed oil for deep-frying

Salad leaves and lemon wedges to serve

Method

First up, prep the squid. If you’re a bit squeamish you might want to get your fish monger to do it for you, but it’s not hard. Rip off the head and set aside, then pull off the fin that’s towards the end of the body or ‘hood’. When you remove it, you’ll see some clear film come away with it. Try and get the rest of this off the hood. Now turn the hood inside out. You do this by poking the pointy end in on itself. As you do this the squid’s ‘backbone’ should pop out of the top. It looks like a clear bit of plastic, grab it and pull it out, and then clean out the inside of the hood with running water.

Next slice down each the side of the hood, cutting it in half. You should end up with two roughly triangular pieces per squid. Lightly score the surface of each piece on the diagonal creating a diamond pattern, then cut bite sized strips of the squid. Now grab the head and cut it just below where the tentacles join together. Discard the rest of the head, and remove the ‘beak’. This is the hard part in the center.

Set the squid aside, and get the coating ready. Grind the Szechuan peppercorns with a pestle and mortar, and then add the chilli flakes and salt and grind again. You’ll end up with a fine-ish red powder. Put the flour and cornflour in a bowl, add the pepper mix and stir together.

Ad this point, put a wok or pan on the heat with enough oil in it for deep frying. Use something low on flavour like rapeseed or groundnut. Whilst this is heating up, coat the pieces of squid in the chilli flour, and shake off the excess. Then chop the spring onion into centimeter batons, cut up and de-seed the chilli, and coat these too.

Now test the oil is hot enough by dropping in one piece of squid. If it curls up and turns a golden brown after 30 seconds or so it’s ready. Fry the squid, spring onion and chilli in batches, being careful not to over cook them (the squid will go rubbery if overcooked) and drain on a few sheets of kitchen towel.

As soon as everything is cooked and drained, eat immediately served on a bed of peppery salad leaves (rocket and watercress is good) with a wedge of lemon.

Love at first bite.

Not surprisingly, I’m still a way off nailing a good imitation, but this bread is pretty tasty, even if I do say so myself, and has a great crust.  The recipe uses an 80 to 20 mix of grey flour and rye flour to add a bit more flavour and texture. If you can’t get grey flour, strong white would do just fine.

Ingredients

400g grey flour

100g rye flour

5g yeast

7g salt

300ml water

1 x teaspoon honey

1 x tablespoon olive oil

Method

First up measure of 300ml of tepid water and mix in the yeast and honey. This should activate it before you add it to the dry ingredients. Next weigh out the flours and mix together with the salt in a big bowl. Now add the water and yeast mixture , the olive oil and mix together. As you mix, the mixture should come together to to form a dough. You’ll have to get your hands in there to combine everything.

Once you’ve done this, turn the mixture out onto a lightly floured work surface and knead for at least 10 minutes. Everyone has their own technique, but this video should get you started. Why do you need to knead? The short answer is that it develops gluten, which makes the mixture ’stronger’ so that it can trap the carbon dioxide that the yeast creates and makes the bread rise. If you don’t knead enough, or your yeast is inactive, you’ll end up with a very dense, heavy loaf.

After kneading for 10 minutes, form the dough into a round ball. See my previous focaccia recipe for the technique for doing this. Once prepared, either place the dough in a proving basket in a lightly floured tea towel, or in a bowl inside a plastic bag  and allow it to rise. This will take about an hour during which time the dough should have doubled in size. When you’ve got to this stage, turn out the dough, ‘knock it back’ (again see the focaccia recipe), form into a round again and repeat the rising process.

When the dough is twice the size again, turn it out and knock it back again. This time roll the dough into a cigar shape, and then flatten it. This should leave you with a strip a little over a foot long. Now fold this strip over end on end, so it becomes a third of the length and flatten down. Tuck the longer sides under with the edge of your palms to create a cylinder tapered at either end. Transfer this onto a floured board or peel, cover with a tea towel and leave to ‘prove’ for about an hour.

Now turn on your oven as hot as it will go, and place a baking tray at the bottom. Just like with the focaccia, you’re going to fill this with boiling water when you bake the loaf. When the oven is up to temperature, the loaf should have swelled to double it’s size again. Slash the surface of it (which will help the bread rise), and then slide it into the oven after putting the water in the baking tray. Don’t hang about.

Bake at full temperature for 10 minutes, at which point the bread will have risen as much as it’s is going to as the crust will have ’set’ and should be golden brown. Turn the oven down to around 170 / 180 and bake for a further 20 – 25 minutes, depending on how hot your oven is.

After the full 35 minutes, remove the bread and place on a baking tray. Resist the temptation to cut into it now. The bread is still cooking, and if you cut it open you’ll release heat and steam, and the bread won’t finish cooking properly. And that’s it. When it’s cooled, slice and eat with whatever you fancy.

This recipe makes one large rectangular pizza with a thin, crispy, tasty base, that is a million miles away from the flabby crud that the likes of Planet Pizza churn out. I would recommend that you make a bigger batch of the dough and freeze half of it to use at a later date. Just double the quantity of the mix (below), and once risen, wrap half in cling film and pop in the freezer.

For the tomato sauce, you can pretty much use the same sort of thing that you’d usually put on pasta. I use a simple sauce made from a tin of tomatoes, garlic, herbs and seasoning. If I can be bothered, I’ll blend it so it’s smooth like passata, but you don’t have to. A bit of tomato texture isn’t a deal breaker.

Obviously, once you’ve made your dough and tomato sauce, you can put anything on your pizza you like. This recipe is for a pizza of two halves. On one side a classic prosciutto themed number, and on the other anchovy and veggies.

Ingredients

For the base:

250g white ‘Tipo 00′ flour

3g powdered dried yeast

4g ground sea salt

1g sugar

150ml warm water

Topping:

Tomato sauce

250g Good quality mozzarella

5 slices of prosciutto ham

1 red chilli, finely chopped

8-10 anchovy fillets

Strips of red onion

Courgette, cut into ribbons with a peeler

Olive oil, rocket and basil to garnish

Method

Making the dough part of the pizza is very similar to the method used for making the earlier focaccia recipe. Mix the water, sugar and yeast together and set aside. Measure out the flour and salt into a bowl and then mix together. Add the yeast mixture to the flour and combine. The ingredients should come together and make a dough. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface, and then knead for around 10 minutes. Coat the dough with a little olive oil, place it in an oiled bowl, cover with a plastic bag or damp tea towel, and then put in a warm place for about an hour until the dough has doubled in size. Now’s a good time to turn on your oven as you’ll want to get it as hot as it will go (preferably 250c +).

Once the dough has risen, turn it out of the bowl and knock it back. Now you’re ready to get busy constructing your masterpiece.  This is going to sound a bit retarded, but remember that you’re going to have to transfer your pizza from wherever you’re making it into an oven. This is obviously trickier with a larger pizza, so make sure you’ve got a plan. I make my pizzas on the baking trays that came with my oven. I flour one up, make my pizza on it and then use it to slide the pizza onto the other tray that’s been heating up in the oven. More on this shortly.

Roll / stretch your dough out into whatever shape you like. The base should only be few milimeters thick; once you’ve got the right shape and size, pinch and roll the edge to form a small crust. If you’re making a pizza with two different flavours as here, you can use some of the trimmings to create a dividing ridge. Once you’re done, set the base aside to 10 or 15 minutes to prove whilst you prep your toppings.

After you’re prepped, spoon a thin layer of the tomato sauce all over your pizza base, and then place on your toppings. On one side tear over the mozzarella, basil and chilli, on the other more mozzarella, shards of red onion, anchovies and ribbons of courgette.

You’re now ready to cook your pizza. Ideally you want to slide it onto a hot surface to try and replicate the conditions of a pizza oven.  I don’t have a stone, so I cook mine on a baking tray that’s been heating up in the oven. As the oven is bloody hot, the pizza should only take around 10 minutes or so to cook.

Once the edge of base is nicely browned and the cheese is bubbling, take it out. On the mozzarella and chili side take the proscuitto, tear it into strips and drape it over the base, then sprinkle with rocket leaves and drizzle with olive oil. On the anchovy side, add basil leaves and also drizzle with oil.

Serve as soon as possible. Molto bene!