Author: Chef M

Chicken soaks up flavours beautifully, especially with a little marinating, and is well suited to cooking over charcoal. Here are three of my favourite flavourings for barbecued chicken. They work equally well with chicken breast, drumsticks, thighs or chicken cut into pieces and threaded onto skewers for kebabs. I think skinless chicken works best, but the choice is yours.

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So simple to make, these feather-light party favourites will please young and old alike. A nick with a knife transforms the basic fairy cake into a fluttering butterfly cake. Straightforward iced cup cakes can be made from this recipe too: just flood the surface with plain or flavoured Glacé icing or Buttercream and titivate with decorations of your choice.

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In the late 1960s I worked at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough as a junior scientific officer. To alleviate the tedium of this bachelor existence, I would slip across the road to the pub with my drinking companions, including one by the name of Armando Cuthbert Darlington. Wearing his name with pride and a dash of fortitude, he would sit on a bar stool all evening smoking Black Russian cigarettes and drinking a potent compound called Parfait Amour. He offered me some once it tasted like the perfume counter at Boots. This recipe is a homage to Armando. Before…

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A rich chocolate cookie forms the blank canvas for your snowy sugar fantasies. Let the kids make stencils by trimming out snow angels, stars, or snowflakes from slips of paper. Then lay these stencils on the cookie’s surface and let the confectioners’ sugar snow gently drift down from above. If you want to hang them somewhere, take the cookies out of the oven while they are only half baked, stencil the still-damp dough, and return them to the oven. (If you stencil them before parbaking, the shapes will deform as the cookies spread.) As they finish baking, the sugar will…

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This scrumptiously comforting burger is inspired by British pub food, which is generally recognized for its down-to-earth, no-fuss cooking style. The barley patties are extra filling and flavored with condiment sauces, spices, and mushrooms. Mustard, mayonnaise, and a sunny-side up fried egg tie the flavors together in this very satisfying and proper veggie burger!

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Mizeria was said to have been the favourite salad of Queen Bona Sforza, an Italian noblewoman who married the Polish King Sigismund I, or Zygmunt the Old, in 1518. She was homesick for Italy and was said to have brought all her Italian cooks with her to Poland to recreate the recipes that she missed. Mizeria derives from the Latin word for ‘misery’ – but though it doesn’t have the happiest name, it is one of the best-known salads in Poland. I eat this salad with almost anything – it’s a family favourite and goes equally well with cold food…

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