1. Cloves - Bread & Butter Pudding

After a weekend of very chilly camping, I've felt a need to constantly fill my belly with comfort food. Anything warming, stodgy, accompanied by gravy/custard is on my list. I knew that I had a cottage pie waiting for me when I got home this evening so my train journey home was spent searching for pudding ideas. I started thinking about a recent episode of Nigella Kitchen where she made a chocolate chip bread pudding so I've used that as my inspiration and adapted it slightly to my taste (I think the chocolate is a step too far in an already sweet dish). This is the perfect pud for a cold evening.

Ingredients

A very small amount of butter for greasing your dish
500ml milk
8 cloves
50g sultanas
A generous glug of dry Madeira (I used this as it was the only suitable booze I had in the cupboard. I think whiskey or dark rum would also work well)250g stale crusty white bread, crusts removed (mine wasn't stale so I dried it out in a low oven for a few minutes)
3 large free range eggs
40g soft light brown sugar
125ml double cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tbsp demerara sugar
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

Method

Preheat your oven to 150C Fan/170C/325F/Gas Mark 3.

Grease an ovenproof dish lightly with butter.

Pour the milk into a saucepan and drop in the cloves. Bring to a gentle simmer over a moderate heat and then remove from the heat and allow to cool completely. This should give enough time to infuse a subtle flavour of the cloves.

Put the sultanas in a separate pan and cover with the Madeira or booze of your choice. Bring to a gentle simmer, let it gently bubble away for a few minutes and then remove from the heat. This will give you plumped up little fruits. Leave to cool.

Slice the bread into rough 3cm cubes and scatter into the buttered dish.

In a bowl or jug, whisk together the milk, sultanas (complete with Madeira), soft light brown sugar, double cream and vanilla extract. Make sure the milk and sultanas are completely cooled to avoid getting scrambled eggs.

Pour the mixture over the chunks of bread. Squidge the bread down slightly so each bit of bread gets a chance to absorb some of the custardy mixture. Leave to stand for 20 minutes.

Sprinkle the demerara sugar and nutmeg over the top and place in the oven for about 40 minutes. Check at regular intervals to make sure it's not browning too heavily on top. The pudding should wobble ever so slightly, don't let it get heavy and solid.

Leave to cool for 10 minutes or so. Enjoy under a duvet in front of a roaring fire. Bliss.

Ingredient 2 - Cloves

That's right, cloves.

I love food full of those warm flavours that are reminiscent of Christmas grub - cloves, cinnamon, molasses, port - but I realised I didn't actually know what cloves were. I know that they have numbing effects because of a story J once told me about having clove oil drip on his face while he was asleep, but I didn't know what these little spicy tacks were.

For those of you that don't know either, and want to find out, read on! In a nutshell, cloves are the dried flower buds of an evergreen tree native to Indonesia. I've read that their name derives from the Latin word 'clavus' meaning 'nail' which relates to the appearance of a clove - a small prong, topped with a little ball - vaguely resembling a nail.

So there you have it. Cloves are ingredient number two. Watch this space...

5. Sour Cherries - Sour Cherry and Dark Chocolate Cookies

The last sour cherry recipe.

These are simple, almost effortless sweet treats. I've made them several times and the recipe has worked consistently and given wonderfully chewy morsels every time. These come highly recommended!

Once again, at the time of making these I was unable to take a photo so I'll make them again soon and post some pictures at a later date.

Ingredients

125g unsalted butter
100g caster sugar
75g light brown sugar
1 medium free range egg, beaten
2 tsp good quality vanilla extract
150g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
A pinch of salt
100g dark chocolate, according to taste (I like one with at least 80% cocoa solids), broken into chunks
75g dried sour cherries

Method

Preheat the oven to 190C/375F/gas mark 5. This makes about 15 or 16 cookies so you will need 2 baking sheets lined with baking parchment.

In a saucepan, over a low heat, melt the butter. Put the sugars into a mixing bowl, pour over the melted butter and beat with a wooden spoon until well combined. Next, beat in the egg and vanilla extract.

Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into the bowl and stir again. Next add the chocolate chunks and cherries and mix through the dough, distributing evenly.

The result will be a sticky dough which is, if you're not bothered about eating raw eggs, irresistible.

Spoon evenly sized dollops of the dough onto your paper lined trays leaving generous gaps between each as they spread quite a bit. Pop in the oven for around 10 minutes (but check after 8) until they are a light golden brown.

When you take them out of the oven, leave on the tray to firm up slightly and then gently transfer to wire racks to cool. The outside will be crisp and the insides soft and chewy.

It's as simple as that! A delicious tea time treat for minimal effort.

Why not try double-chocolate sour cherry cookies? Take out a heaped tablespoon of flour and replace with a heaped tablespoon of cocoa powder.