Nigel Slater - Real fast puddings : over 200 desserts, savouries and sweet snacks in under 30 minutes

This is not a book of instant indulgences. Real Fast Puddings is simply a collection of ways in which you might like to end your meal, most of which take very little time to prepare. Some are literally instant (it takes just seconds to drop a few velvety raspberries into a glass of chilled Gewrztraminer), while others take a full half hour. This book aims to do nothing more than show you what wonderful ways there are to finish a meal, some of which you might not have thought of.

I believe passionately that everyone should allow themselves just an hour a day in which to make themselves something good to eat. If they can share what they make with someone, then even better. But it is not always realistic to ask even that, which is why there were some ten-minute main courses in my last book, and even more ten-minute puddings in this one.

I find it more and more difficult to finish my meals on a savoury note. I will happily eat a piece of cheese to finish off the wine, but a morsel of something sweet, perhaps just a mouthful of vanilla ice cream and a liquor-soaked prune or a crisp water biscuit topped with tart berries and sweet clotted cream, is nigh on essential. I am not alone. Almost every letter I received after the publication of Real Fast Food, to which this is the companion volume, suggested that I had successfully enticed people back into the kitchen only to abandon them when it came to the pudding stage. This book is not a guide to tarting up instant puddings from a packet or a hundred ways with an Arctic Roll. Neither will it let you get away with custard powder or Quick Gel. The whole point of setting down the hundred, no, two hundred, or so ideas is to show that real food, by which I mean fresh food simply prepared at home with love, need not stop with the main course just because time is not on your side. And when is it?

Imagine a fig bulging with ripe scarlet seeds or a slice of perfect, luscious pear with a piece of grainy Parmesan cheese, or perhaps a thin, crisp apple toast hot from the oven. Consider blackberries steeped in a glass of rich red Barolo or a dish of creamy rice scented with rosewater and pistachios. All these are fast puddings. All of them are light years away from the instant puddings in packets, tins or powders. And most take less of your time than the average ready-prepared pudding takes to reheat or a frozen cheesecake takes to thaw.

Friends always expect a pudding when they come round to supper. On the occasions I have ended the meal with cheese there have been looks of barely concealed disappointment that I havent produced a dish of boozy trifle or even a pancake with sugar and lemon. Many of the recipes here will prove suitable for entertaining, though most are meant to liven up the daily meal.

I will have no truck with those spoilsports who suggest that puddings are unhealthy. Of course, any form of over-indulgent eating is unacceptable nowadays, but you will find no suggestion in these pages that a rib-sticking treacle pudding or a creamy dessert should be an everyday affair. It should be noted that the backbone of the book is fruit. I find it difficult to think of a day in which fruit in some form is not consumed in my house. In summer it may be berries squashed and stirred into yoghurt as a quick form of fool, or in winter an almond-topped crumble. Here you will find fruit in abundance: roasted, grilled, pured, baked and brled. And I make no apologies for it.

Many of the suggestions are simply classics with their corners cut. A bread and butter pudding made with fruity, buttery panettone rather than laboriously buttered white bread, a summer pudding made without the traditional overnight wait or a tiramisu that seems none the worse from forgoing its usual chilling time. Whatever quick ways you use, the most important considerations are flavour and pleasure.