An Easter brunch of eggs in creamed spinach with spiced butter seeds, and a Korean-inspired take on spicy fried eggs

Eggs are for life, not just for Easter. Of course I think that, as someone who has just written a book focused on eggs. But this long weekend provides a particularly ovoid prompt. The baked-egg dish does what it says on the tin: lightly spiced seeds add bite and verve to a luscious, creamed spinach base. And the piquant, Korean-inspired skillet eggs are a winning brunch or lunch for one, and equally easy to scale up to feed a group.

These recipes are edited extracts from Good Eggs: Over 100 Cracking Ways to Cook and Elevate Eggs, by Ed Smith, published by Quadrille at £22. To order a copy for £19.36, go to guardianbookshop.com

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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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Perfect for a light lunch, starter or snack: asparagus and artichoke fritters with herby yoghurt, and leek fritters with a lemony, green yoghurt sauce

Just three days to go, people! Three days until the equinox when, at 11.06pm, the sun sits directly over the Earth’s equator as it moves northwards. With both hemispheres sharing the sun’s rays equally, night and day are roughly the same length and the season officially, finally, changes. For those of us who look to our plates as much as we look to the sky, this change in season in the UK is marked, unofficially, by the arrival of one wonderful thing: asparagus! It’s here, and we can all boil it and char it and steam, grill or bake it as much as we can during its short season. I’m never one to miss out on the opportunity to make fritters, so frying is going to be first up in my kitchen, not least because it’s also at long last time to open the kitchen window.

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Only four ingredients are involved in this step-by-step guide to the custardy classic with the crusty top

From gelato to quiche, I’ve never met a custard I didn’t like – and you can’t get much more custardy than a crunchy, creamy creme brulee, which, despite its name, is probably as English as Bird’s custard powder and arguably even more delicious. Fancy enough to impress, yet surprisingly simple to execute in advance, it’s an excellent choice for a special occasion.

Prep 5 min
Cook 50 min
Makes 2

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Egg-drop soup with thick udon noodles and savoury Japanese sprinkles, and a thick and wholesome Iranian-style ‘minestrone’

Like everyone else currently eating their way through to spring, I’ve been thinking a lot about comfort food recently. What makes something tick the comfort food box will vary from person to person, but, for me, there are a few obvious wins. The first is eating from a big bowl – I just love cupping my hands around the base, warming them as I go. Noodles are another big yes. True, “slurp” is perhaps not the most gracious of words, but I’m going to own it fully, chopsticks in (my now warmed) hand. Eggs score highly, too, and broth is never not a brilliant idea. Bring all these together and I think I’ve found a dish that is very comfortably going to see me right through.

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A nostalgic treat: a fluffy coconut cake smothered in buttercream with a big blob of raspberry jam in the middle

I absolutely adored the fat, fluffy wedges of jam and coconut cake at school. It’s not a combination I see much today, but it makes for an instant nostalgia trip. This version is more of an inspired by” cake, rather than an exact copy of the original. I’ve upped the coconut flavour in the sponge with both coconut milk and desiccated coconut, and generously increased the proportion of raspberry jam, because you can never have too much.

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The chilli-lime peanut dressing makes this dish sing with flavour, and you can cook the rice in a microwave

The dressing in this recipe elevates anything into a great quick dinner. With peanuts, lime and chilli, it can go on pretty much everything, but it’s particularly good on just-roasted aubergines. Add broccoli, rice and a nice soft-boiled egg, and you’ve got all your food groups in one easy, 30-minute dish.

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A chicken, herb and celery stew with almonds and a return visit to an old friend: the Persian frittata known as kuku, made with aubergine and onions and studded with lemony currants

• Ask Ottolenghi: send in your kitchen questions

Some people are sure they were a particular animal in a previous life. The swimmer was a dolphin, maybe, and the pilot a bird, but me? I’m only certain that I was at a Persian dinner table at some earlier point in life, and my love for Persian food was signed, sealed and stamped for ever more. Or maybe I just adore turmeric-stained, saffron-infused, barberry-spiked and flaked almond-topped food so much that it makes me feel poetic. Either way, the gift of Persian cuisine, which somehow pulls off both abundance and balance at exactly the same time, is one that transports me every time.

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A creamy layered dessert beloved of the southern US – but whose is the definitive version?

Banana pudding wasn’t on my radar until a chance conversation with American food writer Charlotte Druckman , editor of the excellent anthology Women on Food , who alerted me to its existence – plus anything labelled “pudding” has my immediate and undivided attention, anyway. In the US, the term refers to a particular variety of thick and milky dessert – what we might call a custard, or a pastry cream, or even a blancmange, depending on the method used – and this particular banana-studded pudding/trifle hybrid has a long history, first popping up in print in the late 19th century*, by which time the tropical fruit was well established in North America.

Why it became particularly associated with the South in the mid-20th century is a mystery that South Carolina food writer Robert Moss has probed without success , but the fact remains that “you can’t swing a dead cat in a Southern barbecue joint without hitting a bowl of banana pudding”, or, he adds, at a Southern church picnic, holiday gathering or tailgate , for that matter. And there’s a good reason for that: it’s ridiculously good. If you, like me, have a nostalgic fondness for the bananas and custard of childhood, this is the dinner-party version, with just a touch of American glamour. (Oh, and I’m told that, strictly speaking, it’s known as banana puddin’ in the South.)

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