Scoop something cold and sweet into something soft and bready for a scrumptious sandwich treat

The Amalfi coast, summer 2005: I’m 14 years old and on a family holiday. I keep seeing people eating these brioche rolls stuffed with ice-cream and, naturally, they’re all I can think about. When I finally get one, it’s not at all how I’d imagined – the brioche is a bit stale, and the sun melts the ice-cream inside and it runs down my elbow. I still love the idea of it, though, and I like to think this version is an improvement on that first one I ate in Italy.

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All four Thai flavour sensations – salty, sweet, sour and fragrant – feature in a prawn salad with green mango and peanuts and a pineapple coconut lime loaf for dessert

I still remember the first time I tried Thai green mango salad. It was, and is, a heady combination of flavours: salt, in both crystals and from fish sauce; sugar, preferably unrefined; fresh chilli, lots of it; citrus tang from the lime; and lots of aromatic notes from the herbs. It’s also very simple to bash together at home, as is this embellished version with prawns and peanuts. Just make sure you have a large pestle and mortar, which is the secret to many a great sauce.

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Store-cupboard heaven: a no-bake, creamy coconut and passionfruit tart with a biscuit base, and a simple and adaptable spiced pineapple tart with bay cream

I’ve always felt that dessert is the best part of a meal. And I’m typically the designated dessert person – the one who volunteers to bring along something sweet. It’s a role I take very seriously. My new book is full of the recipes I make for those cosy dinner parties with friends, for church potlucks, last-minute get-togethers, weekend lunches, big family gatherings and everything in between. These two tarts put store-cupboard staples and tropical fruits to work for an easy, refreshing end to any meal.

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Europe’s weights system is baffling for American cooks used to volumes and cups, but will metric’s accuracy eventually tip the scales?

Like most Americans, Samin Nosrat grew up in a home with cup measures in the kitchen. That said, they didn’t always get used. “My mom taught me in a more ‘old world’ way,” she says – measuring the water to cover rice with one of her knuckles, for instance. Nosrat, the author of cookbook Salt Fat Acid Heat and presenter of the Netflix show with the same name, has built a career on what she calls “sensory-guided cooking” – helping home cooks to build culinary instincts by understanding how ingredients behave – and so admits to having “a somewhat tortured relationship with measurements”. But as a recipe writer, she describes herself as “neurotic”. “If I’m going to write recipes which are clear and which work,” says Nosrat, “it just makes sense to use scales. I have three sets.”

There is a chasm between Europe and America’s kitchen cultures. The fundamental difference is that Americans use volume, not weight, to make measurements in their kitchens. Cooking with cups is volume-based and relies heavily on visual cues – everyone knows what a cup of granulated sugar looks like; less so 200g or 7.1oz – while the metric system is weight-based. “The issue isn’t that Americans weigh things differently,” says Sarah Chamberlain, a writer who Americanises British cookbooks for the US market. “It’s that most of them don’t weigh things at all.”

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There’s no reason to give up your favourites, whether that’s flavoured yoghurt, white sliced bread or cookies. The key is to make them yourself

The reasons to avoid ultraprocessed foods just keep coming. The largest review of evidence to date , published earlier this year in the British Medical Journal, highlighted 32 ways in which UPFs are doing us dirty, from obesity and heart disease to type 2 diabetes and cancer. As Dr Chris van Tulleken, one of the world’s leading experts on UPFs, put it at the time, an “enormous number of independent studies … clearly link a diet high in UPFs to multiple damaging health outcomes, including early death”.

And yet still we buy them. In the UK and US, they now account for more than half of the average diet.

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Teenagers queue outside bakeries to buy pastry seen on TikTok that puts American twist on French pâtisserie

It was 3 February when the queues started forming at Boulangerie Louvard in Paris. Even in the sort of downpour that usually empties streets, clued-up teenagers gathered outside the family-run bakery in the 9th arrondissement, desperate to get their hands on one thing: its owner Stéphane Louvard’s invention, le crookie.

It’s a crisp croissant filled with American-style cookie dough, then baked to achieve a soft, gooey centre, and a video of the Frankensteined pastry had gone viral on TikTok.

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A fresh take on seasonal favourites adds Middle Eastern spice and cleverly accommodates leftover hot cross buns for afters

The daffodils are out, parading their annual magnificence, and I can’t help but be enchanted by the beauty of spring. While I’m not religious, I also can’t help but revel in the festivities of Easter. Eggs, lamb and hot cross buns are all traditional, but these fuss-free recipes give them a new lease of life. Buy in some flatbreads and pickles to serve alongside the meat, so you aren’t stuck in the kitchen for the whole day. After all, there are more important things to do – such as hunting for chocolate eggs!

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A real blow-out, luxury Easter cake of joy – and no chocolate for a change!

Easter is a time for celebration, and this definitely counts as a proper celebration cake. Taking inspiration from bakewell tart, it has three layers of moist almond sponge broken up with cherry jam and a silky swiss meringue buttercream. I only ever use almond extract in bakewell – it’s one of those ingredients you either love or loathe, but I find that just a few drops bring the right amount of fragrant marzipan flavour to this Easter cake.

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Some complain that pricey sourdough is elitist and pretentious. Others lambast cheap sliced white as unhealthy and unsustainable. How did our most basic foodstuff become a source of conflict and division?

The cheapest loaf in my nearest supermarket costs 45p. The cheapest loaf in my local artisanal bakery costs £5. Which of these facts winds you up?

For Giles Yeo, a professor of molecular neuroendocrinology at the University of Cambridge, it is the £5 sourdough. Writing in the Guardian this month, he railed against “bougie” bakeries charging more for “fancy” bread. For Chris Young, the coordinator of the Real Bread Campaign , it is the 45p white sliced. In response to Yeo’s article, he pointed out that ultra-processing enables supermarkets to sell bread so cheaply.

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