These were easy to make and a big hit.

• 100g softened unsalted butter
• 100g golden caster sugar
• 100g light muscavado sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 175g plain flour
• half a teaspoon of baking powder
• pinch of salt
• 140g white chocolate

Preheat the oven to 190 C.

Beat the sugars and butter together until creamy. Add the egg and vanilla essence and mix. Sift in flour, baking powder and salt and mix again. Smash the chocolate into small chunks and mix in.

Dollop lumps of mixture onto non-stick greaseproof paper and bake for about 11 minutes. We did 2 batches. Put the cookies on a wire rack to cool and eat while crispy on the outside and gloopy inside. Yum.

Adapted from Annabel Karmel’s cranberry & white chocolate cookie recipe in BBC Good Food magazine, Christmas 2001.

A (female) friend of mine points out that only men like Sophie Dahl, whom she describes as over-doing the ’simpering blonde’ thing. Like that’s a bad thing.

Anyhoo, this pudding is as camp as a summer’s day, if not Christmas. Tilly decorated the top with whipped cream, sprinkles and marshmallows.

• Packet of jelly – Sainsbury’s Basics jelly is 9p a packet I think
• Smallest available tin of evaporated milk
• Stuff to go on top – whipped cream, sprinkles, marshmallows, fruit etc.

Make the jelly up – dissolve the cubes in half a pint of boiling water, then make up to a pint using evaporated milk rather than water. Set in fridge and when ready, go mad on top. Eat in a tree house on a quiet, plane-free sunny day.

The trick here is to use the cheapest jaffa cakes you can get – generic, basic supermarket ones – and the best vanilla ice cream you can find. We made this with Kelly’s Cornish clotted cream ice cream.

Ingredients:

• Jaffa Cakes
• Vanilla ice cream

Method:

Put the jaffa cakes in the freezer for an hour or so. Take the ice cream out of the freezer to soften, and stir to make what my children call ‘ice cream cream’. Remove jaffa cakes when frozen and smash with a rolling pin. Fold the jaffa cake bits into the ice cream.

I would have included a photo but it didn’t last long enough to take one.

Thanks to Dave, Daisy and George in Carlisle for this.

Boil 2 small cans of condensed milk for 90 minutes. Have faith they will not explode, and use an old saucepan – when we did this a bit of the paint came off the tins. Better still try and find tins with paper labels.

Crush about 250-300g biscuits to a medium fine crumb – either digestives or ginger or some of each. Add 125-150g melted butter, push firmly into the base of a dish, making a layer about 1cm thick. Leave to set.

Chop enough bananas to make another layer 1cm on top of the biscuit base. Open the tins of condensed milk – the contents will have magically turned to toffee. Spread over the bananas, top with cream and grate chocolate on top.