Magic Rock Brewing Co. is a fairly new brewery based in Huddersfield.  Their aim is to brew big, modern beers and they do that very well indeed.

First up is Rapture, a huge red beer with the capacity to scare the living daylights out of mere mortals.

It’s a monster of a beer that grabs and shakes you around, toying with you in the same way that a cat would with a dazed mouse.

There’s a beguiling sweetness to it, a citrus flavour that veers towards rich and dessert-like.  Think eating a slice of incredible cake in the middle of a forest after a downpour, sweet pine in the nose.

There are five types of malt and six different hops crammed into this bottle, which explains the complexity and the sheer excitement of it all.

Lovely stuff.

The bottle claims to be the ‘same, but different’ which is clearly a lie.

There’s nothing else like this.

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Baking is one of the most difficult forms of cookery, at least in my opinion.

It’s more a branch of science than a culinary endeavour, one that needs precision and technique, both of which are some way beyond me.

I’m also not an habitual eater of dessert.  I like the odd cake every now and again, and I’ve been known to make some very nice ice cream indeed, but dessert is something that I don’t normally pay a lot of attention to.

Ready for Dessert, David Lebovitz’s new book was something of a challenge.

It started on the cover for me…that cake photo on the front is probably one of the last things I’d ever dream of cooking, so I wasn’t that keen on exploring further.

But….but!…Lebovitz’s last book, a Titanic volume on ice cream was a complete triumph, and everything I made from it turned out fantastically well, so maybe…maybe…

There’s a certain style to Lebovitz’s writing, a friendliness and enthusiasm that’s quite compelling and entertaining.  It makes Lebovitz’s recipes engaging and tempting.  There are Big Recipes here, but none feel out of reach because of the clear and easy to follow directions and advice about ingredients, equipment and technique.

Ready for Dessert is split into five main sections – pies, tarts and fruit desserts, custards, souffles and puddings, frozen desserts, cookies and sweets and basic sauces and preserves.  It’s a logical structure that covers a lot of ground.

An awful lot of ground.

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These biscuits didn’t really come out as they were intended.

They should have been thinner and much more fragile, but the slightly thicker and heavier versions I ended up with have a good heft to them.

They’re not what they were meant to be, but they taste good and that’s all that really matters.

Beat 225g of unsalted butter and 250g of granulated sugar together in a bowl with a wooden spoon, or better still, in a stand mixer until it’s smooth and starting to go pale.

Mix in 60g of golden syrup and a teaspoon of vanilla extract and then incorporate two eggs, one at once.  Make sure that the mixture is smooth and properly mixed.

In another bowl, mix together 420g of plain flour, two and a half teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda, two teaspoons of ground ginger, two and a half teaspoons of ground cinnamon, half a teaspoon of ground cloves and a teaspoon and a half of ground black pepper.

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Have you ever gone to the fridge to cook something and noticed at the last second that the date on it had passed maybe a day or two ago?

Did you chuck it out and cook something else, or did you chance your luck and give it a go?

Depending on the particular type of label on the food, it may or may not have been OK.  There are big differences in the meaning of the various dates on UK food packaging.

Some dates are absolute drop-dead dates, or rather drop-dead if you eat it dates, where others are more advisory.

It can be a slightly confusing business.

The one to watch is the ‘Use By’ date.  ‘Use By’ is an indication of food safety and is applied to foods that can and do go off with disastrously pathogenic consequences.  These are foods that can spoil quickly and are very perishable from a microbiological point of view.  They go off quickly, and when they go off, they can do you some real damage.

‘Best Before’ means something subtly different.  A food with a ‘Best Before’ date will be in good condition up until that date, but after it, its quality will have degraded.  It won’t necessarily present a risk of illness, but it won’t be as good.  Those packets of spices you bought a couple of years ago for that obscure curry are probably a good example – they’ll probably be safe to eat, but they’ll taste of…dust.

Something a couple of days past it’s ‘Use By’ date could be a real hazard, even though it might look and smell perfectly fine, but something a couple of days past its ‘Best Before’ date will most probably be fine.  One is a dire warning, the other a bit of gentle advice, but people don’t often distinguish between the two, which results in tonnes of perfectly edible food ending up in the bin every day, just bear in mind that the old maxim of ‘if in doubt, chuck it out’ holds true.

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