Recipe collections

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.

Banana fried with bacon makes a great breakfast. Bacon fried banana slices, seasoned with maple syrup, are best served as a breakfast sandwich filling, on toasted sourdough.

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.

Buckwheat banana fritters for delicious (and gluten free) breakfast. Smashed bananas in buckwheat pancake batter, and a drizzle of honey is a must!

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 and nut granola clusters, crunchy and fragrant homemade cereal for those who like it ultra-crisp. The mix bakes into one large bar to be broken up into crunchy clusters.

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

My best barbecue ideas for meat and vegetable kebabs, with marinade recipes for beef, lamb, pork and chicken. All you need is a green salad and pita bread on the side.

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.

Beef and shiitake mushroom fried rice is the best dish you can make with the smallest piece of beef fillet or sirloin. Make sure you use fridge cold rice for any fried rice dish.

Homemade beef burgers in Hokkaido milk buns. Burgers crown the list and I think the secret really is in that slice of gherkin that a burger should be topped with. Joking aside - good minced beef has lots of flavour and sometimes, but sometimes, it can beat an average steak for me.

Beef fillet stuffed with porcini mushroom duxelles: it's a keto Wellington or filet de boeuf sans croûte. Beef tenderloin opened up like an envelope, spread with mushroom filling and roasted beautifully pink.

Beet, horseradish and dill cured salmon, it takes only three days and the taste is unparallelled. Beetroot doesn't do much for the taste but the colour is to die for. Next - pork belly!

Crusty tart with beetroot greens and garlic topping. If you get hold of really new, baby beets with vibrant, tender leaves, use them in salads.

Red bread - made with raw grated beetroot, with a few raisins, sunflower and caraway seeds. Admittedly, this loaf hasn’t come out quite as red as I was hoping. The raw grated beetroot does adds a lovely flavour and moistness.

Beetroot gratin, thinly sliced beets baked in garlic and dill infused cream, a gorgeous side to a fish course. No need to pre-cook the beetroot.

Mixed raw and cooked beetroot in tangy dressing. As all things dark red or purple, beetroot is incredibly rich in nutrients especially when eaten raw.

Bigos, traditional Polish dish a.k.a. hunters’ stew, is a long-cooked, hearty pot of sauerkraut and assorted meats. Best after three days of cooking!

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.

Black rice risotto cooked Italian style, with poached pear quarters and gobbets of blue cheese, is the best way to enjoy the black or purple, ‘forbidden’ rice variety.

My take on French veal casserole, blanquette de veau a.k.a. blanket de veau in my house. With dried wild mushrooms and lots of cream, it's deliciously rich.

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 Victoria sponge cake, with layers of lightly roasted blueberries and whipped cream. Sponge cake, as the name cleverly suggests, is supposed to soak up the filling/syrup/drizzle/jam/cream.

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!

Blueberry duck is an oven-roasted duck breast fillet with blueberry sauce, flavoured with a hint of rosemary. It's the nicest and the simplest blueberry sauce for duck.

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 flavoured frozen yoghurt, made without ice cream maker. And yes, you can make very good one at home. Here’s how.

Fragrant blueberry jam made in a small batch with a sprig of rosemary is the flavour match made in heaven. This will be your all-time best homemade jar of jam.

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 parfait with strained yoghurt and lightly roasted blueberries. My blueberry parfait is uncertain what it wants to be: for some it will be breakfast and others will insist it’s only fit for after dinner

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.

Roasted bone marrow with salty, herby topping is the quintessence of umami. Marrow is ultra-nutritious and needs just 20 minutes’ roasting in a hot oven.