Recipes

Nigella Lawson

I have a particular fondness for Bara Brith, the traditional Welsh fruit-speckled tea bread. My late sister Thomasina lived and worked in Wales, and my first taste of it came courtesy of her next door neighbour, Dai, over 30 years ago. It’s extraordinarily simple to make: you steep dried fruits and treacly sugar in hot tea overnight, then the next day you simply stir in an egg and some flour and pop it in the oven. As Dai did, I add a couple of teaspoons of mixed spice (though you can easily substitute dried ground ginger or cinnamon alone if you prefer) though I choose to add it to the steeping fruits rather than the flour. The only difficult thing about any of this is having to wait a day after baking before eating it. But this is a counsel of perfection: you can eat it as soon as it’s cooled, but to taste Bara Brith at its best, I would beg you to be patient. You may have noticed there’s no butter (or any fat) in the recipe: this isn’t a mistake: the butter comes in later, when it is essential. Believe me, there is nothing better mid-afternoon than a thick slice of Bara Brith spread generously with butter, so generously that the Danes would recognise it approvingly as tandsmør — which is to say, butter spread thickly enough that you leave teeth marks in it after taking a bite! And please read the Additional Information section at the end of the recipe before proceeding.

Nigella Lawson · Nigella Bites

You might think that nuts, untampered with, are perfect picking food as they are, and up to a point you

Nigella Lawson

I love the way a handful of mournfully overripe, positively unprepossessing bananas give rise to this vulgarly triumphant cha-cha-cha of a cheesecake. Well, it is a cheesecake, but the texture is not the usual smooth cream; rather, it is aerated and moussy and as light as its perfume is, contrariwise, compellingly heady. You can make the toffee sauce while the cheesecake is cooking or cooling. Either way, you want the sauce completely cold, but it shouldn

Nigella Lawson

It can be hard to adopt other countries’ Christmas traditions and cherish them like our own, but when it comes to this Dutch log of almond paste, encased in puff pastry, I have no problem whatsoever! Rather than make long logs (or, indeed wreathes or letters, as they do in the Netherlands) I cut them into short lengths before baking, which rather gives them a look of sweet sausage rolls. They should, in this form, a Dutch friend tells me, more properly be called banketstaafstukjes, though I’ve settled on Banket Bars instead. They make a great alternative to mince pies for those who shudder at the very idea of dried fruit, and a most desirable addition for the rest of us. They are reassuringly easy to rustle up. No need to make your own puff pastry, but you do need to make your own almond paste. However, it’s not hard to make almond paste: in a processor it’s the work of lazy minutes. (And by the way, almond paste and marzipan are not quite the same thing.) The only thing you need to remember is to make it a day (or up to 3 days) before you go a-baking, but since the puff pastry is best thawed for a day in the fridge, too, you can have both in the fridge ready and waiting for you at the same time. And please read the Additional Information section at the end of the recipe before proceeding.

Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson · How To Be A Domestic Goddess

Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson · How To Be A Domestic Goddess

Nigella Lawson · Nigella Express

White chocolate morsels can be used in place of the butterscotch ones and my children seem to love both with equal fervour, though I

Nigella Lawson

Whenever I

Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson · How To Be A Domestic Goddess

Nigella Lawson · Nigella Summer

Nigella Lawson · How To Be A Domestic Goddess

I know this sounds like a mad idea, but I came across this in a ringbound book I bought off the internet in the middle of the night called The Joy of Muffins. Joy indeed, for what do you know, these taste so good: gooey, crunchy, soft and filling; sticky buns for the slapdash cook.

Nigella Lawson · How To Be A Domestic Goddess

This is so temple-achingly sweet that one small marked-out diamond, or maybe two, is enough. But even so, I love its perfumed sugariness — as much as I love the tender, rose-shot green of its equally fragrant nubbly interior.

Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson · How To Be A Domestic Goddess

Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson · Nigella Summer

If you want to forgo the grilled radicchio alongside, then do and just make a tomato salad to go with it, but the combination, as it stands, is perfect: the heat-wilted radicchio loses some of its bitterness, but keeps just enough perfectly to offset the delicate, not-quite-blandness of the ricotta. The summer-scentedness of thyme deliciously permeates both.