I loathe winter but I make do as I don’t have the necessary funds to jet around the world following warm weather. So I make do and take advantage of one of the few benefits of Winter-Soup. Whenever I think of cold weather, I think of this soup. It’s spices and fragrant lemongrass are perfect to give it a lift above a plain sweet potato soup.

Whatever you do, only use the tender parts of the lemongrass. The first time I made this, I had no idea about lemongrass and my dinner guests were left with grassy pieces of lemongrass in their soup.

Sweet potato & coconut soup

• 1kg sweet potato, peeled and chopped
• 1 teaspoons oil
• 2 tablespoons grated ginger
• 2 teaspoons cumin seeds
• 2 red chillies, chopped
• 2 stalks lemongrass, finely chopped (do not used stringy green part)
• 2 cups vegetable stock
• 2 cups coconut milk
• 1 tablespoon palm or brown sugar

1. Steam sweet potato for 10 minutes until tender and soft. Drain and set aside.

2. Heat oil in saucepan over medium heat, add ginger, cumin seeds, chiles and lemongrass and cook for 3 minutes.

3. Place sweet potato and cooked spice mixture ina food processor or blender with 1 cup of hte stock and process until smooth. Add the other cup of stock and process again.

4. Place puree in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add coconut milk and palm sugar and stir until soup is simmering and hot.

Serves 4

Ahhh Winter, I have fully surrendered to you by now with this recipe. This is an unashamed Winter Warmer recipe designed to make you less resentful of the cold weather by helping you embrace it.

It’s a sweet caramelly version of a bread and butter pudding, the milky caramel soaking into the croissants on the bottom side leaving the topping lovely and crunchy with sugar. Nigella suggests that this feeds 2 greedy people. I’d say that for dessert this would feed 4 greedy people but perhaps she means as a main. If anyone would suggest eating this as a main, it’s Nigella. Which is why of course we love her.

Caramel Croissant Pudding

Serves 2 greedy people

• 2 stale croissants (I used 3 fresh croissants)
• 100g caster sugar
• 2 x 15ml tbsp water
• 125ml double cream
• 125ml full-fat milk
• 2 x 15ml tbsp bourbon (I used scotch)
• 2 eggs, beaten

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4.

2. Tear the croissants into pieces and put in a small gratin dish; I use a cast iron oval one with a capacity of about 500ml.

3. Put the caster sugar and water into a saucepan, and swirl around to help dissolve the sugar before putting the saucepan on the hob over a medium to high heat.

4. Caramelize the sugar and water mixture by letting it bubble away, without stirring, until it all turns a deep amber colour; this will take 3 to 5 minutes. Keep looking but don’t be too timid.

5 Turn the heat down to low and add the cream – ignoring all spluttering – and, whisking away, the milk and bourbon. Any solid toffee that forms in the pan will dissolve easily if you keep whisking over a low heat (there was a large lump of toffee which took about 5-8 minutes to whisk and dissolve away). Take off the heat and, still whisking, add the beaten eggs. Pour the caramel bourbon custard over the croissants and leave to steep for 10 minutes if the croissants are very stale (as my croissants were fresh, I skipped the steeping).

6 Place in the oven for 20 minutes and prepare to swoon.

Recipes by Nigella Lawson from Nigella Express

With the decidedly frosty weather lately, it seems an appropriate time to take out the winter foods, aka comfort foods , aka the foods to eat under the doona or quilt (if I actually let my husband do that). I am not a big fan of Winter. Indeed, my husband and I would love to “migrate” to warmer weather during Winter if we had the bank account to match. So the only thing I look forward to in Winter is wearing hats and gloves and eating warming comfort food. This helps me bide my time until Spring and Summer.

I love crumbles but at the risk of sounding unhealthy, if I am to be honest, I prefer the topping so I always make sure that there is plenty of buttery, nutty, oaty topping on my crumbles. Crumbles are also great for fruit that isn’t as sweet or luscious as one would like. I suggest ice cream for this as plums can be a little tart and I find that clotted cream by itself isn’t quite sweet enough. And I also love this recipe as you get something in the “Bonus Round”. That is, you get a bonus cupful of fragrant plum and pear flavoured syrup to mix with some sparkling mineral water.

Plum and pear crumble

• 250mls (1 cup) water
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon or 1 cinnamon stick
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 120g (2/3 cup, lightly packed) brown sugar
• 800g plums, quartered, stones removed
• 2 pears, cored and cut into pieces

For topping

• 80g butter
• 120g plain flour
• 100g brown sugar
• 40g rolled oats
• 80g nuts (I used macadamias and pecans) coarsely chopped
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon baking powder

• Ice cream to serve

1. Preheat oven to 180°C.

2. Combine the water, vanilla essence, cinnamon and brown sugar in a medium heavy-based saucepan and stir over medium heat until the sugar dissolves. Bring to the boil and simmer, uncovered, for 6-8 minutes or until mixture is slightly syrupy. Add the plums and pears and simmer for 3-4 minutes or until the fruit are just tender.

3. Cool and drain the plums of most of the syrup - you don’t need the fruit to be bone dry, some syrup is still nice and helps to have the claret shaded juice to bubble up at the edges.

4. Place plums in the base of a 20cm pie plate

5. To make crumble topping, combine butter and flour in a medium sized bowl. Mix with your fingers until it is combined, then add in oats. At first, it won’t be like fine breadcrumbs as there is a bit more butter but once you add the oats it will be like coarse breadcrumbs. Add brown sugar, nuts, cinnamon and baking powder. Mix well.

6. Top fruit in dish with this rubbly mix. Bake for 2-25 minutes until golden.

7. Serve with ice cream

For a refreshing drink, mix 1 part spiced plum and pear syrup with 4 parts sparkling mineral water.

I have officially fallen in love with my pink Kitchenaid, especially its dough hook. I have even bought a cover to protect it-not that my kitchen is a target for stray missiles, but to keep the greasy stickiness that inevitably envelops everything at bay. Previously, I had shunned most dough and bread baking, mainly because I didn’t have the strength or will to knead for the 10 minutes required. Now I pop all of the ingredients in the big bowl, attach the hook and I can come back 6-7 minutes later and it will be kneaded. I say I can come back but I never do, as I prefer to watch the dough hook mix it all in in some sort of perverse food porn observation ritual.

These are so ridiculously moreish that I found myself eating 5 of these babies for lunch and forgoing my usual relatively healthy lunch. And this is from a girl that rarely has seconds. So I warn you, make these with caution and at someone else’s behest. Invite a large group of friends or lumberjacks in for morning tea. Anything to put some distance between yourself and 20 of these tempting, deliciously scented, buttery buns.

Norwegian Cinnamon buns

For the dough:

• 600 g flour (I added some extra flour as the dough was too sticky)
• 100 g sugar
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 21 g (3 sachets-yes, really) easy blend yeast or 45 g fresh yeast
• 100 g butter
• 400 ml milk
• 2 eggs

For the filling:

• 150 g soft, unsalted butter
• 150 g sugar
• 1 ½ teaspoons cinnamon
• 1 egg, beaten, to glaze

• Roasting tin approximately 33cm x 24cm or large brownie tin, lined with baking parchment bottom and sides

Preheat the oven to 230°C/ gas mark 8 (I wouldn’t do this until the end of Step 3)

The ginormously risen yeast beast

1. Combine the flour, sugar, salt, and yeast in a large bowl. Melt the butter and whisk it into milk and eggs, then stir it into the flour mixture. Mix to combine and then knead the dough either by hand or using the dough hook of a food mixer until its smooth and springy-add extra flour until the dough becomes a good rolling consistency. Form into a ball, place in an oiled bowl, cover with clingfilm and leave it to rise for about 25 minutes.

Vast tundra of dough with buttery cinnamoney sugar filling

2. Take one-third of the dough and roll it or stretch it to fit your tin; this will form the bottom of each bun when it has cooked. Roll out the rest of the dough on a lightly floured surface, aiming to get a rectangle of roughly 50×25cm. Mix the filling ingredients in a small bowl and then spread the rectangle with the buttery cinnamon texture (you can made this mixture up during the 25 minutes of proving the dough in Step 1). Try to get even coverage on the whole of the dough.

A little uneven, I’m sure you’ll do better than my rather poor effort

3. Roll it up from the longest side until you have a giant sausage. Cut the roll into 2 cm slices which should make about 20 rounds. Sit the rounds in lines on top of the dough in the tin, swirly cut-side up. Don’t worry if they don’t fit snugly together as they will swell and become puffy when they prove. Brush them with egg and let them rise again for about 15 minutes to let them get duly puffy.

Snug as a bug in a rug

4. Put in the hot oven and cook for 20-25 minutes (a couple of mine were a bit black at the top by 20 mins so watch out for them), by which time the buns will have risen and will be golden brown in colour. Don’t worry it they catch in places. Remove them from the tin and leave to cool slightly on a rack-it’s easy just to pick up the whole sheet of parchment and transfer them like that-before letting people tear them off, to eat warm.

From How To Be A Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson

I named this soup after me, mainly because I love home made soup but I dislike expending energy effort for things (cupcakes and cakes excluded). I’m convinced that pumpkin peeling and cutting is a task that’s reserved for people in hell (or whatever you happen to believe in) as its thankless, difficult and may risk a potential scrape of skin or loss of finger.

So the fabulous thing about this is that you wash the pumpkin, stick it on an oven tray lined with a baking sheet, turn your oven onto 200 degrees Celsius and let it roast whole for an hour (more if you have a particularly large whole pumpkin) while you do something much more worthwhile like read a magazine or watch tv. I prefer using whole pumpkins as they last longer than the cut versions. For very large pumpkins you can speed up the cooking process if you’re losing patience with your pumpkin (and I sometimes do when I’m hungry) after an hour you can cut it open into slices as it will be very soft to cut and this makes the cooking even faster and caramelises the pumpkin slightly too. If one thing, we’re safe from pegging him with an Oedipus complex such is the vast difference between his Mother and I (although we do get along very well).

If I am working from home I usually put this in the oven in the morning at about 10am and go and do some work and before I know it, its ready for lunch. The best thing about this, like most soups, is that it freezes so well. I realise that this is more a winter dish but the way that Sydney’s weather has been lately and with the rampant flu bug going around its definitely time for a renaissance!

Lazy person’s 3 ingredient 3 step and no elbow grease pumpkin soup

• 1 small Jap pumpkin-700g or thereabouts doesn’t matter if its larger, you’ll end up with more roast pumpkin afterwards
• 150ml coconut milk (the creamy layer at the top of a tin of coconut milk if you don’t shake it is best)
• 2 cups chicken or vegetable stock (plus an extra spoonful of chicken or vegetable stock powder)

1. Roast whole pumpkin in 200c oven for 1 hour or until soft
2. Remove seeds and peel off the skin, it will come off satisfyingly easy
3. Add pumpkin, stock and coconut milk into blender and blend away

I added a swirl of flaxseed oil but this is completely optional

Variation: add fresh finely grated ginger
Variation: omit coconut milk and add dollop of sour cream and chives