Anna Higham - The Last Bite: A Whole New Approach to Making Desserts Through the Year

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Ive written this book to give you the confidence to feel just as at ease when it comes to dessert as you do for savoury food, to really cook. So often, sweet recipes are given as a fixed creed to be followed exactly. I want to create the space to show you the principles that underscore my recipes and where those principles can be pushed or manipulated and where substitutions can be made. I often hear people say that dessert is something they just cant do or that they dont understand. It is just cooking. Cooking in the same way that making a bowl of pasta is, or roasting a chicken or putting together a salad. Those things feel more straightforward because you practise them more. You probably cook a meal most days (Ill let cooking be a broad term here) so you get to see, smell and touch savoury ingredients over and over. You get to know them by repeated exposure. Ive spent the past 10 years getting to know sugar, cream, flour and, most importantly, fruit. The goal of this book is to pass on that knowledge and familiarity to you.

I am privileged to have worked with many passionate people who have taught me not only how to search out the best ingredients but also how to make those ingredients taste the most of themselves. I want to communicate that passion, knowledge and skill to you. Working alongside savoury chefs has taught me to think beyond a recipe. Taught me to cook with my senses, with my instincts and to trust my palate. After a decade as a pastry chef, Ive learnt that there are many different approaches to dessert just as there are in the rest of the professional kitchen. These are the key points that define how I think about dessert; my pastry chefs manifesto if you will.

Your first thought when you eat a dessert should always be thats delicious. Your second can be thats interesting but never the other way around. You can engage the eater, you can challenge them, but the first mouthful should always inspire an mmmmmm. I think chefs sometimes find this notion hard to grasp as it can seem too easy to make someone say yum when sugar and fat are involved. The challenge lies in not abusing those benefits. How to harness the power of sugar to intensify the flavour of fresh strawberries or to balance the bitterness of a lemon without overwhelming either? How to use cream and eggs to capture the floral scent of a blackcurrant leaf? How to use butter to make rich, crispy puff pastry while keeping a dessert light enough to enjoy every last bite?

Spend your time searching for the best-tasting fruit, chocolate, dairy produce, grains or sugar and your job becomes really quite simple. I will never be a pastry chef who sculpts sugar and chocolate; I have neither the patience nor the inclination. I can, however, spend hours in whatever weather picking sun-warmed strawberries, having my arms scratched while searching for ripe gooseberries or driving to meet a dairy farmer. I think seeing the produce grow, knowing the farm your cream comes from, meeting the miller responsible for your flour, is more inspiring than reading a hundred recipe books. Connecting to a producer transforms the way you think about and treat ingredients. If you want to reduce food waste, then grow or pick your own fruit and vegetables. People instantly respect food more when they have helped to harvest it. I am of the belief that once you taste a perfectly ripe berry, you no longer think that you can improve it through manipulation. Instead, the goal becomes to create a dessert that showcases that berry. The skill is in making it taste the most of itself it possibly can.

Making a dessert is still cooking as much as, say, cooking a piece of fish. It took me a long time to really learn this. Cooking requires you to engage your senses no matter what youre making. You learn to understand the colour you like your caramels the more you make them; you feel the subtle difference between an undermixed and a perfectly silky dough, the correct bounce of a sponge and the wobble of a custard tart. Intuition and feel have as strong a place in the sweet kitchen as they do in the savoury, sitting alongside skill and technique in the same way. The more you cook, the more you learn to trust your instincts. Maybe the recipe says to bake for 20 minutes but after 15 you think it looks good and the other markers are telling you its ready, so trust yourself. Maybe youll get it wrong sometimes: a dish may be overbaked or underbaked but either way, you will have learned and youll take that learning with you to the next bake.