Following the increase in demand for gluten-free dishes, I thought it’s about time to try something different. My Wicked Bitter Chocolate Cake recipe is also gluten-free, but I am constantly wishing to nurture my own curiosity by trying something ‘new’ and different from my usual repertoire of recipes.

So here we have it, a delicious flourless chocolate and pecan cake, which in itself is completely dairy-free. The vanilla cream topping is entirely optional, so if you want to keep the cake dairy-free too, then you can serve it without the topping.

When you make this cake, the mixture will look like a lot and you might think that the tin is too small, but do not fear because once it’s cooked the cake will sink as it cools down. The first time I baked this cake I made a mistake and divided the cake mixture between two tins, so I then ended up with two quite flat baked cakes (which was not my intention!). The cakes were still usable though and I simply sandwiched them together with the vanilla cream in the centre rather than on top.

Cooking and eating pies at this time of the year provides a welcome comforting ‘hug’, making you feel that the cold and gloom are not so bad after all. The game season is in full swing now and I particularly enjoy cooking with venison. It’s packed full of flavour, contains very little fat and is a bit different. During the summer we cook and serve a lot of beef, so when the game season begins it’s great as it offers us more variety, and I like a bit of variety.

Venison can be very strong in flavour, so make sure when you buy it from your butcher you know exactly what it is that you are getting. Your butcher will be able to tell you if it’s fallow, muntjac or red dear. They all vary a bit in flavour, so choose according to your preference.

These delicious venison pies are perfect for providing a comforting autumnal meal. The carrot and potato rösti topping is a different variation on the norm of using either mashed potato or pastry (you could even try using celeriac instead of the potato).

I have made these in four individual serving dishes, but if you prefer a large family-style pie, use one large serving dish and remember that the pie will require a slightly longer cooking time. Serve simply with plenty of crusty bread to mop up the delicious juices.

So, armed with that knowledge, I thought it’s time to do a quick Google search and be inspired to make my own version of a Linzer Torte, so here it is. I have made one fundamental change and that is to use walnuts instead of the more traditional almonds, but the choice of nuts is yours and you can use almonds, hazelnuts or even pecan nuts instead, if you prefer.

That particular week, Mrs Cochrane brought me a couple of kilos of fresh greengages and I also needed to make a new dish for my set lunch dessert menu. Well, hey presto, problem solved as the greengages were turned into jam in a jiffy, so the next stage was to perfect my pastry to make the tart. This pastry is slightly tricky to handle as it’s so short, but it’s well worth the effort as the results are ridiculously fantastic!

You don’t have to use greengage jam for this recipe (though it works very well with the walnut pastry, I must say), you could use another flavour of good-quality shop-bought (or home-made!) jam instead, such as raspberry or loganberry jam or even marmalade.

The ricotta that we buy here in the UK is not quite the same, but it’s perfectly delicious and is good enough for me to bring back many happy memories. I recommend not buying half-fat or low-fat ricotta because the taste is just not the same. If you are going to eat and enjoy it, it is best to buy full-fat ricotta and only eat half the amount.

This recipe is ideal for a starter or light lunch, served with fresh crusty bread.

My mother loves cheesecake and she usually makes the chilled set type of cheesecake as it’s easy and she does not really like to use the oven – too expensive she says. My saying always used to be, “Mother, if you are going to eat cheesecake it has to be worthwhile, and in my opinion it has to be a baked cheesecake.” She likes to remind me of my words every so often, and I must say after all these years that my opinion still has not changed and I still agree with myself!

I make a baked crumble for the base, but if you really do not have time then use crushed digestive biscuits instead. I quadruple the crumble recipe and then use the leftovers for a delicious gooseberry crumble. Alternatively, the leftover crumble mix will keep in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 1 month (or it can be frozen), and it can then be used to make more delicious cheesecakes.

Loganberries are a hybrid of a raspberry and a blackberry. The large berries are deep purple red in colour and their sharp taste is similar to that of a raspberry. Their season coincides with the raspberry season and usually finishes before the blackberry season begins. We buy our loganberries from High House Farm, not far from us in Suffolk.

You could alternatively use blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries or rhubarb for this cheesecake.

All credit for this recipe goes to Ross. We change our set lunch menu each week, and a few weeks ago Ross had left planning a vegetarian starter until the morning (he is quite good at leaving things to the last minute, much to my despair!). After discovering he had not ordered special ingredients for his ‘special’, he had to go and ‘forage’ in the fridge for something to use for his dish. He found puff pastry trimmings, a few pears and some boulangère potato leftovers from the main course section, plus some goat’s cheese. He came into the kitchen as smug as a cat that had found the cream and I laughed at him asking what he thought he was going to achieve with his findings. Still smug, he shrugged his shoulders at me, said nothing and set to work. I thought to myself he has got his work cut out, but I soon had to ‘eat my words’ when he pulled this one out of the bag.

The puff pastry, potato, cheese and onion pie smelt absolutely delicious when he pulled it out of the oven. He made one big pie and then cut it into slices and served it with more crumbled goat’s cheese, some crushed roasted walnuts, shavings of fresh pears and dressed salad leaves. It not only makes a perfect starter, but is equally suited as a main course or even as a light lunch.

I love autumn and winter for the range of colours that Mother Nature displays, and for the peacefulness around us, with everything going to rest for a few months, but consequently, the seasonal produce available at this time of year is a bit more limited. I like British apples and pears as the varieties are numerous and there are lots to choose from. We get our apples and pears from High House Farm, where Piers and Suvie endlessly and painstakingly look after their fruits. We also get fantastic outdoor rhubarb and cherries from them.

For this recipe, I used Discovery apples at the beginning of the season, and now I’m using Cox’s Orange Pippin apples. I prefer an apple with a reasonable sweet and sour balance and I think these two varieties are perfect.

At this time of the year, we have an abundance of chestnuts and walnuts, along with pears, quinces and apples, all of which we squirreled away at the end of autumn going into winter. These ingredients will not last long but whilst available can be used to create some delicious and warming recipes.

I am a sucker for a good tart, savoury or sweet, and when the pastry is homemade, it’s even better. I recently made a large batch of my rough puff pastry, a recipe I am very fond of as it’s a success every time. First, I made my sweet fine pear tart for our weekly lunch menu, and then the following week as there was still plenty of the pastry leftover (which I had kept in the freezer), we felt it was time for a savoury number. Keeping the pastry in the freezer is brilliant as it remains as good as when you first made it and it’s very handy to have some as a back up for when you need a tart in a hurry.

There is something both very satisfying and gratifying about making your own pastry, in fact, I think that a good cook is defined by the quality of their homemade pastry – perhaps a bold statement but nevertheless one to think about. My keys to success for a flaky and very puffy rough puff is that all the ingredients must be very cold, you must work quickly, do not knead the pastry and follow the rolling process meticulously, and success should be guaranteed every time.

These tarts are rustic, not pretentious, and they are very gutsy in taste indeed. If you are going to do it properly, do it with meaning, I say! I have chosen a Norfolk-made blue cheese, called Binham Blue, made by Mrs. Temple, and it’s a punchy blue cheese with perfect acidity and creamy ratios. I like it to such an extent that I class this as one of my all time favourite blues. It’s from our region and simply feels right, but do find your own favourite local blue cheese for this recipe, if you like.

With the really chilly weather, hearty and punchy flavours are needed to keep the cold at bay. The combination of blue cheese, walnuts and pears is a classic, but I do not mind classics as they taste good together and work very well for me.

Holding the final product in my hands, I feel both honoured and humbled to have been given such a wonderful opportunity and I hope you grow to love it as much as I do.

After all this time, I still can’t quite believe that we have finally produced a cookbook and I can still remember my first conversation with Jon Croft, Publisher and Managing Director of Absolute Press (an Imprint of Bloomsbury), as if it were yesterday.

It was 4:30pm on a bright clear May afternoon. I had just finished my staff lunch, when the phone rang. It was Jon. He asked whether I would consider writing a cookbook. When I responded that I had recently declined such an offer because I had felt that the other publisher was not quite right for me, Jon turned on the charm… and the sales pitch.

Well, as they say, the rest is history.  Here we are with the book completed and launched in all its 448-page glory. I am very aware that I could not have done this on my own and I am grateful that I was supported by such an amazing group of people on my journey.

Looking back, I realise how incredibly lucky I am to have had Jon and Absolute Press, as my publisher. I couldn’t have chosen a more understanding or perceptive company when it came to interpreting my passion for food and cooking and I’m so proud and fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with them.

As the art director, Matt Inwood had the difficult job of taking my words and images and making them fit together. Not an easy task and we had many awkward and tricky conversions. One of my main weaknesses was that I found it extremely difficult cutting down my recipes. As a chef, I can only compare it to the feeling of what it must be like to have to choose between ones children. In the end, I managed the process of limitation by justifying to myself why each recipe featured in this book, deserved its space on the page. In addition, my photography was by no means professional and it was purely due to Matt’s patience and tenacity that the book has ended up coming together so well.

In fact, that reminds me that the images themselves represented a drama of their own, which I’ll share with you. In September 2011, we had an unexpected power surge and my Mac and external hard drive, failed.  When I thought that I had lost all 24,000 images, I cried like a baby. At the time, I truly felt that my life was not worth living. It was and probably still is, the most stressful experience I had ever had. I was very close to having a nervous breakdown. We had just signed the contact with Jon and I didn’t know what to do – even the experts at Apple couldn’t retrieve the data. Luckily for me, Tim and Andy from Bruizer, a local film production company and good friends of ours, helped out; they pulled a few strings and talked to the right people. The hard drive made a U-turn at the University of Manchester and after 3 months of agony, Tim was finally the bearer of good news… and all 24,000 images!

We can now all have a laugh about it, but I think the experience certainly aged me. In fact every time I see the image of ‘the Rabbit’, I recall how I felt at the time. It was the one image that was burnt onto my mind; I knew that if we found that image, we would have found them all.

Two other troopers, who played a major role in the writing of this book, are Anne Sheasby and Imogen Fortes.  These two ladies had the task of editing every single word I wrote. And I mean EVERY word. I can’t count the number of e-mails we exchanged nor the amount of hours we spent in front of the computer, but when I consider what we have produced and when I read what I have written, I know every second was worth it. I have no regrets! Looking at this book through the eyes of both an author and a chef, I’m happy to say that I would not change a single thing.

And last but not least…the cover, which was designed by Claire Siggery, a very talented graphic designer from Bristol. In fact, it was the one episode in the whole process that I found truly bizarre.  I had had no input with the design of the cover and was waiting in anticipation for what it would look like. I think in hindsight, that I was hoping to find some fault with it.  But, when it finally arrived, I was gob smacked.  I could not fault it at all. That Matt had commissioned a cover such as this, finally demonstrated to me how well Matt had come to understand me as a person and how well he had grasped me as a chef and author. I felt truly grateful and can only thank whoever it was, whether Matt Inwood or Jon Croft, who had the great vision in bringing something as beautiful as this cookbook, to life.

But… this book is not a coffee table book.

No.

It’s a cookbook that has the desire to be used; used as a reference book every day of the week and every week of the month…I hope that in reading my book, you are inspired to buy local, cook seasonal and enjoy eating the fruits of your labour.

Lots of Love

Maddy xx

A signed copy available from our shop at £30 +£5 for postage UK only (For outside UK please contact me via [email protected])

Our beehives are doing well – fingers crossed we shall gain a few jars this season for our own pleasure and joy. John Buzz our bee man has warned me that with the cold and wet the bees are not particularly productive, well only time will tell and we still have a few more weeks of summer to go.

Here at British Larder HQ we make everything in bulk, I usually make a test batch large enough for tasting and selling, in this case I made 12 tarts for the restaurant and one for me. However the honest truth and I feel confession time coming on, drum roll…, I shared one with everyone and then had another whole one all to myself. Oops does that sound selfish? Hope not as they are really delicious; go on give it a try.

The pastry I used is my good and trustworthy sweet shortcrust pastry, we make up to five times the volume of the recipe, divide the mix into small blocks and freeze them, it comes in handy as it will defrost overnight in the fridge ready to be rolled and turned into these delicious little numbers.

The ice cream is equally delicious and in my opinion if you are going to bake and make a treat, do it well. This recipe is not for anyone on a diet that is for sure! I make the honey ice cream base and use an ice cream machine to churn the ice cream; when it’s ready I transfer the ice cream to a chilled tub and pour the honey crushed raspberries over then take a fork and give it a gentle mix, not too much as I like the ripple effect.

Make the tarts one day in advance and the ice cream can be made up to three days in advance, the longer you keep the ice cream the harder it will get to scoop so my advice is that it’s best to be used within a week. The tarts are delicious when they are slightly warmed through in a mild oven before serving.