Chocolate

You could be forgiven for thinking you’d walked into Oz: in the past couple of years, the whole world has gone green. Pale green, to be precise. Suddenly, pistachio is everywhere: it’s in our pastries, our chocolate, our coffees, our puddings, and even showing up in perfumes, paint charts, scented candles and on our fashion runways. Where has this sudden lust for pistachio come from? In one way, pistachios are old news: they’re an ancient crop that has grown in the Middle East and been used as an ingredient in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cookery for as long as can be remembered. They’re even referred to in Genesis: ‘Take some

I’m standing in my kitchen aiming a hairdryer at a pan of uncooked brownie batter and feeling like I might have finally lost my mind. I’ve done a lot of strange things in pursuit of recipe perfection, but even for me, this is an odd one. Brownies are a funny old beast. We think of them as quite straightforward, both in the making and in the eating. But actually, that’s not fair. There are countless variables which can produce anything from a dry chocolate cake to uncooked fudge. And – more importantly – for a glorified traybake, they’re pretty damn expensive to make. A whole pat of butter, lots of

Here to separate the good eggs from the great eggs, we’ve tasted the Easter treats from the UKs favourite retailers. The 2022 eggs range from the innovative to the slightly baffling but the good news is there’s great options here for every taste and budget. Autore Milk Chocolate Egg with Pistachios, £19.70 – Delicaro Upper crust food merchant Delicario is selling a selection of eggs made by Campaian cocoa ultras Autore Chocolate. This is the sort of website where you can buy Japanese beef that was pampered to death and special tuna fed exclusively on truffles (probably) so expectations are high. The thick, milk chocolate comes with a generous pebble-dashing

I unironically love Easter eggs. I love the posh, fancy ones, the high street ones, the budget ones. From the sublime to the ridiculous, I have time and space in my heart for all of them. My husband is sick of hearing my grand theory that Easter egg chocolate is, in fact, the best of all chocolate, probably because the theory really only extends to the fact that Easter egg chocolate is thinner and snappier than that of chocolate bars. When it comes to trends this year, we’re seeing more Russian doll-style eggs (which rose in popularity last year), which as well as being visually impressive mean a variety of