Baking

Focaccia is an excellent sharing bread, perfect for serving at supper, and it’s really easy to make. You can certainly skip the rosemary and the sprinkle of salt on top, though those are traditional. Feel free to expand this recipe and experiment by mixing various herbs and flavourings into the dough. However, you might want to ask an Italian if you can still call it focaccia! You can also use a food mixer to knead this soft dough….

This fragrant, gently spiced tea bread is a true pick-me-up perfect for ravenous children returning from school, or anyone in need of cheering up. Bananas become much sweeter and more deliciously scented as they mature, so make sure the ones you use are well ripened. They will be much easier to mash too. Serve this tea bread thickly sliced – just as it is or with butter. After a few days, it’s best lightly toasted and buttered….

You can’t beat a good old cheese straw! If you have a spare block of rough puff pastry lying around and need an idea of what to do with it, cheese straws are a great crowd-pleasing savory treat, especially around the Christmas period. These can be made in advance and stored in the freezer until you need them. Once cooked, they don’t dry out as much as other rough puff items due to the amount of cheese involved….

A chunk of moist, golden cornbread, still warm from the oven, is a great partner to soup or a hearty salad. Hugh adds grated carrot, which keeps the cornbread nice and tender, and contributes a delicious hint of sweetness….

If you only ever make one cake, let it be the glorious Victoria sandwich. The simple mix of equal quantities of eggs, butter, sugar and flour, sandwiched together with raspberry jam, is unquestionably the queen of British cakes. It has long reigned supreme at the tea table, the village fête and the garden party – indeed, a freshly baked Victoria sandwich will lend itself to almost any occasion. Originally, to make a perfect cake, the eggs were first weighed in their shells and the exact equivalent weights of butter, sugar and flour were measured out. With the strict grading of eggs these days, it’s not essential to do this, but I would stick to this rule if you’re not sure precisely what size your eggs are – for instance, if you keep hens yourself. If you are buying eggs in a shop, I recommend using medium ones to equal the quantities of the other ingredients in this recipe. Get to know this recipe if you can, not least because it forms the basis of all manner of other cakes. With the addition of a few well-chosen extra ingredients, the classic Victoria can swiftly be altered to almost any flavour you fancy (see variations overleaf). You can also use this recipe to make cup cakes….

“This is my new go to recipe for “Sweet” Shortcrust Pastry. The sweet is in inverted commas, as there’s only two teaspoons of caster sugar, but it’s just enough to shift this recipe (which I use without any sugar for savoury purposes) into dessert mode.” Hugh…

Coming up with unusual pizza toppings has become a bit of an obsession for Hugh – this is a current favourite. It’s not worth making the dough in smaller quantities than this, but if you’re only feeding a few, you can freeze some of the dough (in pizza-sized portions) and scale down the topping accordingly….

Available for only a few weeks of the year, delicious homegrown cherries are highly seasonal. What’s more, these summer gems are as coveted by the blackbirds as they are by us. Anyone lucky enough to have a cropping cherry tree will have to pit themselves against these feathered foragers in order to gather in a harvest. Otherwise you ll need to keep a sharp eye out for them in farm shops, markets or your local greengrocer’s. The crumbly, nutty streusel topping is a crunchy delight….

Tarte au citron is another one of those classic puds for which countless different recipes exist. Many begin by making a lemon curd for the filling, but the method here is a lot simpler, and just as good as any curd-based tart. Photo by Simon Wheeler….