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giveaway! I know! Valentines weekend seemed like the right time to do this, because nothing says love quite like gooey, indulgent baked goods. You can keep your temporarily wildly overpriced roses – using brownies as a weapon, the quickest way to anybody’s heart is through the stomach. But cookbooks make a pretty good aid, too.

It’s a common affliction, for people who love books: there comes a point when your flat is more pages than bricks and mortar. The piles – loved, to-read, to-donate – become the bones of your home, in the same way that the stories and recipes themselves become part of the structure of you.

But in a home, you sometimes have to knock a wall down to create a little light, right? My desk drawers at work have books in them, ones that I’ve finished but haven’t yet re-homed. One of my flatmates trained as a chef, so we have a packed bookcase in the living room, and there’s another in the corner of my room. The space above my clothes in the wardrobe is populated by hardbacks. I like to imagine that they hang out when I’m away, much like you assumed your dolls did while you were at school, only less creepy. Maybe the magicians speak to the astronauts and the secret societies. Hopefully the octopuses preside over it all, arms waving like so many conductors.

I digress. It’s time to knock down a wall. And you get to reap the benefits! Continue reading →

One of the things that always baffles me when I come home is my mother’s recipe collection. Dozens of cookbooks, a folder full of ripped out magazine pages, some of them decades old, and a bunch of hand-written recipes. It’s extensive and spans at least 30 years, going by the design and crispy edges of some of those magazine pull-outs, and tells stories without trying. Even the style of recipe writing has changed in that time, no-nonsense instructions from Mrs Beeton giving way to seductive adjective-laden notes from Nigella.

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So here’s the thing. Cooking and baking aren’t just about cooking and baking. They’re not wholly centred on the outcome, at least for those of us who take pleasure in flour explosions and licking our fingers to dab up the crumbs of cheese that have somehow escaped the grater.  It’s just as much about zoning out from the stresses of day to day life, concentrating on weighing ingredients and not dropping egg shell into your mix.

When I step into the kitchen, knowing that I’ll likely be there for hours, this is the playlist that comes with me. It doesn’t always run in this order and I’m adding to it all the time. There’ll always be a little bit of Celine Dion – belted out horribly, and loudly – and some dancing about in the square metre of floorspace to Walk the Moon. A touch of funk from Betty Davis, followed by possibly the oddest selection of music I could have put together.

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You know when you do something even though you know it’s a bad idea? A terrible, brilliant idea? I did that when I bought biscuit spread/Speculoos, knowing full well that it’s 65% biscuit and I have a weakness for biscuits like some women have a weakness for men with big arms.

On the top of the jar there’s a little “TRY ME” sticker, on which you’re invited to write at least 15 words about the spread and send them to the company and get a nice little cheque for the price of the spread. “Ahha!” I thought. “I can do better than a mere 15 words! I’m a writer at heart after all!” Despite the fact that I’ve not written any poems since I was forced to at school about seven years ago, I started to think of fun things while I stirred my porridge and by the time I got on the tube to go to work, I had a seven-verse poem, with rhymes and everything.