Macarons: an addiction

The French macaron is the jewel in the beret of pâtisserie française. Wander past any bakery and they're there glittering up at you, row upon row of tiny almond biscuits of every imaginable colour and flavour; hot fuschia against acid green, delicate violet beside deep chocolate. Pistache, cassis, rose, orange-flower, praline, vanilla, lavender, passionfruit, marrons glacés, jasmine, lemon, coffee, lily of the valley, licquorice...

A macaron is a chic Parisian woman in edible form. Dainty, frilly, seductive but with a hard outer shell. Expensive. And very often completely unattainable, which is why very few people make them at home. The best place to buy them is probably Ladurée, which has several elegant salons du thé dotted around Paris, and a far less elegant, clunkier caff on the ground floor of Harrods which still charges a good £15 for eggs Benedict but comes without an essential garnish of "je ne sais quoi." Give the chi-chi tea room with its crappy (and very French) service a miss in London, but if you're feeling frivolous do go for a pick'n'mix box of beautiful macarons. They make sublime gifts (a man coming home with a box of these is guaranteed some serious oh la la-action), and the sumptuous eau de nil and rose boxes look more like they contain frothy French knickers than petit fours.

However, if you are inclined towards a spot of baking or fancy trying something new, macarons can be made at home fairly easily, meaning that you can turn out these stunning jewels in any flavour and colour, at any time, for any occasion. And believe me, you will. Macaron-making can turn into something of an obsession.

When I finally cracked the recipe, I was hooked good and proper, turning out batch after batch every week in order to get my fix. I bought industrial-size bags of ground almonds and icing sugar and turned the kitchen into my very own mac-den; with baking trays and piping bags and silicone paper strewn across every surface. I got my rocks off to rosewater, my kicks out of food colouring, cheap thrills from chocolate ganache. I became the Mad Hatter of macaroons. Nights were filled with kaleidoscope reveries of rainbow colours and sugar trips. I would awake in the night delirious, raving wildly about peanut butter and lavender sugar. Relatives and friends started to worry; there were talks of an intervention. Something had to give.

A year on, and I've learnt to put things into perspective. I now usually make macarons only once a week, maybe twice. One has to think of priorities. But occasionally, just sometimes, when I wander unwittingly past a particularly gleaming pâtisserie window, I can't help but stop and press my nose to the glass, fixed like Golum to the ring. It's best to take it one day at a time.

This is the easiest recipe you'll find, with no sugar thermometers, powdered egg white or tears in sight. You are guaranteed perfect macarons if you follow it correctly; as usual, pastry recipes are pretty precise. It is taken from Ottolenghi's book, which is hugely worth seeking out in itself.

Try them just once and you'll understand.

Basic method:

120g icing sugar

60g ground almonds

60g egg whites (usually 2 large free-range egg whites)

40g caster sugar

Set the oven to 160C. Cover two flat baking trays with baking (non-stick) paper. Prepare a piping bag with a 1cm nozzle.

In a food processor, whizz up the almonds and icing sugar, then sieve them together into a bowl so you have a fine powder.

In another, GREASE-FREE bowl, beat the egg whites with electric beaters until foamy, then add the caster sugar a bit at a time until you have a stiff, but not too dry, meringue.

Take a third of the meringue and, with a metal spoon, fold it into the almond mixture, quickly and as lightly as possible. Repeat with the other two thirds, making sure not to knock the air out of the mixture - quick, light folding - it's all in the wrist. Want you want to end up with is a molten lava consistency (what else indeed?), so that when you part the mixture with your spoon it flows back together in a couple of seconds.

Spoon into the piping bag and pipe small discs of about 3cmc, each a few cms apart from each other, by keeping the nozzle still and squeezing the bag so that a small circle forms. Whe you have done a sheet, pick up the tray and tap the base quite hard against the work surface to pop any air bubbles. Leave to rest for 15 minutes, then bake for about 6-8 minutes. What you should end up with is disks witha domed surface, a little frill ("feet") around the base and a flat bottom, as below.

These ones - chocolate - had 12g of cocoa powder added to the almond mixture (take away 10g of ground almonds to compensate), made just the same way. As far as how they should look, these ones are the Holy Grail. Chocolate are usually more popular than any others too. In the same way, you can flavour the dry mix with anything you like - a bit of cinnamon, coffee powder, ground cardamom, lime or lemon zest.....just nothing wet. If you wanted to use something like rosewater or orange-flower water, or a flavoured syrup, to flavour the macs, add it to the meringue before incorporating, with any food colouring. Just as little extra liquid as possible!

Where flavours are concerned, though, go wild.

Sandwich them together with buttercream or a chocolate ganache (cream and chocolate). Eat them and weep.

Chocolate, peach and lavender:

Londoners

There is something about London. It is a city which, more than any other I know, champions the Individual.

But we're all just one big in-crowd. Yes, we're split into tribes, divided as we are by cash, culture and postcodes: the Camden Kids; the Sloanes; the too-cool-for-school Hoxton homies; the Stoners, the Skaters and the Player-haters; the City Boys and the mummy's boys; the Bohos and the Bobos and the complete-and-utter no-nos; the "I'm Not A Plastic Bag"s (Hindmarch not Primark, natch) at the farmers' markets; the Yummy Mummies; the Topshop Princesses teetering absurdly in this season's bondage-style shooboot; the Goths clomping miserably around in God-knows-what season's bondage-style f**k-you-boot. Not to mention the other 50 per cent of Londoners hailing, by origin or ethnicity, from every possible corner of the globe.

We are quick to dismiss country bumpkins and green, blinking-eyed alien invaders of our big bad city. Yes, poor fool, you may very well be aware that there is a McDonalds within suitcase-wheeling distance of Big Ben, the Eye, Buck Palace and Madame Tussauds, but have you heard of Brick Lane? A mile of curry houses, Bengali-cheek-by-Pakistani-jowl, rounded up by the best Jewish bagels and baked cheesecake you could dream up? Chew on that one. Or what about the sprawling corner of Hackney boasting the best pho this side of Hanoi; a Chinatown with more Peking duck than you could shake a chopstick at; and a whole haremload of Arab joints up around the Edgeware Road? Nope, didn't think so.

Between us we speak in a thousand different tongues, but no language is more universal and uniting than that of a Londoner's tut-tut-tutting, teeth-grinding, snorting irritation at outsiders in our tube stations. Wide Americans with bumbags and baseball caps; skinny-jeaned fourteen year-olds from the Yorkshire Nowheres on their way to an indie concert, gulping like goldfish at their first taste of freedom in the hot, airless tunnels of subterranea; greasy Italians in shiny trainers, thick hoardes of Japanese. Kindly step out of our way, we seeth. We don't want you here.

Oh, don't get us wrong. We love foreigners. London is the world's shrine to multiculturalism, didn't you know? We have among us Eritreans, Tongans, Bolivians, even a few Welsh. A Londoner can have a Lancashire accent or be a practising Rastafarian, he can fast at Ramadan or feast at Diwali. We have many disguises, but look around the sea of humans at Holborn station at around 5.30pm and you'll spot us. Resigned exasperation is the trademark look of the Londoner.

Train Station

The coffee tastes of boiled semi-skimmed and yesterday's ashtray. Far from a pick-me-up, it becomes just another pointless thing to carry; a grown-up's drink in a baby's beaker. Absorbed in anticlimax and mildly angry as I somehow always am when there is no one waiting at Eurostar arrivals with a a great big grin - it is a journey which, I feel, merits some sort of romance - I trudge red and harassed through the vast station, past grungy backpackers, babbling tribes of Japanese teenagers, and big girls with wobbling bottoms resplendent in tight, shiny leggings. The sort of girls whose fake tan makes their hairline resemble a Lanzarote beach at low tide. The sort with hair extensions and, Lord help us, Ugg boots. English girls.

Up ahead, some sort of absurdly grinning air-hostess is standing in front of a lurid stall, gormlessly shoving a tray of tiny bottles in front of innocent passers-by. As I traipse past, she jabs one at me, baring her teeth like some maniac hyena. The red mist descends further.

'Yakult?!' she leers.

God, no.
Why on earth would anyone actually go to the trouble and expense of bottling a substance which so closely resembles semen with added Splenda? Who, pray, would actually pay to be faced with the "spit or swallow" dilemma every morning? Dear me, no. Save yourself the cash and make your boyfriend's week. I really can't imagine your "millions of friendly bacteria" would hold it against you.

I recoil and scowl at the Yakult-harpy. She cowers, and for a long moment I bask in the precious, precious look on her face. The mist is lifting.

So typical: in France you might be accosted with generous chunks of warm, chewy pain artisanal or a glistening, majestic wedge of apricot tart by a stout Frenchman, his flour-dusted apron straining hard to contain belly and bonhomie. In England, we're force-fed bodily fluids masquerading as health foods. And, being British, we gushingly, joyously accept this gruesome sludge because, well, who doesn't love a freebie? It's enough to make one scurry back under the channel faster than you can say Sarkozy.

Crab

My hands are really too messy to write. I had a whole crab for tea, smashed over the plate and accompanied in the best way possible by some good bread and a wedged-up lemon. I sat there, in blissful solitude, for a good hour-and-a-half, poking the meat out of the nooks and crannies with a chopstick.

Earlier today, after buying the crab, and being duly propositioned by the fishmonger selling said crab (vive la France!), I got on the bus home. Halfway there, I am brought back down to earth from ipod-induced reverie by something brushing hard against my shin. Then a hard pinch. I let out a shriek and nearly fall out of my seat. Everyone is staring now. Suddenly realising what has happened, I peer down at my shopping. The angry little crustacean, frantically grasping at any last hope of life, has clawed its way through the reinforced carrier bag and is now frantically grasping at my jean leg instead.I prise the pincer apart and stuff it back into the bag, which I then hold up for my audience. "C'est un torteau" I tell my fellow passengers.

A few smile, one or two chuckle; matronly housewives simply nod knowingly at what is obviously a perfectly normal post-poissonerie scene in this country. I imagine the same scene back in England, and now I'm the one chuckling.

Hilarious, indeed, to think you'd get a live crab so easily in England.