You can never have enough...

[Olive]

...

I did a bit of baking yesterday, using a recipe from the internet that was an awful let down. Don't know what I did wrong but it was a complete failure, first time that's happened for decades, complete waste of ingredients. Back to the old family cookbooks for me! When they pulled out the hot water tank there was an ancient cookbook behind it, 70s I'm guessing, full of contributed recipes from all over the country complete with the names of contributors, and old ads with five numeral phone numbers.

Those were the days...

It's never a good idea to trust internet recipes, even those from well known cooks and chefs.   Most amateur recipe writers have no idea apart from a drive to raise their own profile, and whereas cookery books (particularly older ones) are usually rigorously edited and recipe-tested,  food blogs are under no quality control.   And I can't bear the way they hold forth interminably with banal "background" tales and opinions, all to get more clicks.

Mind you, my worst cooking disaster was about 10 years ago when I diligently followed a Gordon Ramsay recipe for a caramel custard flan and it didn't come near to setting at the temperature and time given and gushed all over the plate when I tried to serve it.

I don't do much baking (I avoid gluten) but when I do bake I like Nigella Lawson and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, each of whom have an army of recipe-testers and editors behind them.