Bad Cook

540g plain flour

5 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

2 eggs

340g caster sugar

140g unsalted butter, melted

380ml milk

grated zest of 1 lemon

200g raspberries, plus a few extra for the topping

150g white cooking chocolate, bashed up into small chunks

1 Preheat the oven to 170ºC and get out your muffin cases.

2 Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt and set aside. In a mixing bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar and melted butter (make sure the melted butter isn’t too hot or it will curdle everything). Whisk in the milk and lemon zest, then carefully fold in the fruit and ¾ of the chocolate.

3 Add the sifted dry ingredients and fold together very gently. Don’t be afraid to leave the mixture very lumpy and rough – this is what will make it muffin-like rather than fairy-cake like. Also raspberries are reasonably delicate and you don’t want to reduce them to pulp.

4 Spoon the mixture into your cases and fill up to the top – unlike fairy cakes, these will not rise very much so if you leave space in the muffin cases anticipating a rise, you will be disappointed. Dot with one or two extra raspberries and some more chocolate. Bake for 30–35 mins or until a skewer comes out clean.

Poached Pears in Marsala

The critical failure with a poached pear is in the eating. When presented with a whole one, the only thing to do is grasp the top with thumb and forefinger and cut down with a spoon. But the pear almost inevitably slides away out from under your spoon, slopping sticky juices and crème fraîche everywhere.

I think the answer must be to core the pear pre-poaching, or to poach the pear in segments.

Anyway, however you eat poached pears, they are just bloody delicious and this recipe is really terrific – the sauce you get out of it is wonderful and sticky and if you have any leftover, keep it to throw over some ice cream at a later date.

An important note on this is that you need your pears to be really quite ripe for this to work. The poaching can only soften up a not-quite-ripe pear so much – so this isn’t a dessert you can do if you’re just ordering everything off Ocado, because who knows what sort of state they’ll turn up in.

Poached Pears

For 4

4 pears, doesn’t really matter what sort, peeled and cored or cut into segments, depending on how you wish to resolve the presentation question

30g butter, at room temperature