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Why? It's more or less like scrambled egg.

炒牛奶, stir-fried milk with prawns, prawn roe, flying fish roe and crispy yu tiao doughnuts. Hong Kong comfort food is the best.

I say colleagues, but I actually bake for the team I manage as a form of enslavement! To become one of them, all I want is your soul, your every waking moment, every ounce of energy and every flicker of the fire in your belly that you have, every shred of effort and endeavour and moral fibre and momentum...and for our every meeting to last no more than 15 minutes max, because talking about work is not work.

Others things I make for my colleagues; an enormous trifle, with two layers of pistachio and marzipan gateaux, raspberry curd and raspberry coulis, creme diplomat (creme patissier folded into softly-whipped cream), jelly I made myself with 3kg of raspberries, caramelised pistachio praline and edible silver leaf.

BRUCE!!

Mille feuille nabe; layers and layers of cabbage, thinly-sliced pork belly, cavolo nero leaves, thinly-sliced beef, and enoki mushrooms. You drizzle it all in stock, sake or soju and sesame oil and simmer it till cooked. Mille feuille nabe.

Vanilla cupcakes, with a bit of the innards cored out and filled with raspberry curd and then topped with toasted meringue/marshmallow frosting and sprinkled with freeze-dried raspberries. And a lemon curd version, filled with an 8 egg yolk lemon curd, frosted with marshmallow and sprinkled with edible gold dust. And then in case my friend's kids think the curdy ones are too sour and do not like, some of my boring traditional floral cupcakes, which are nothing but vanilla cake and pedestrian buttercream - because nothing says "I love you, friend" like hopping her 6 year old and her toddler up on massive hits of sugar and food colouring at the start of a long weekend.

Savoury oatmeal/cheat's congee, with oats cooked in chicken stock till soft and then topped with green onion, white pepper, salted leek flower sauce, Lao Gan Ma black bean and Sichuan peppercorn chilli oil, crispy shallots, soy sauce and a nice dollop of snowy duck fat to melt in and make it all silky.

Constantly amazed at the delicious wonders I can rummage up from the bowels of my freezer and the back of my pantry..how's this for a working from home lunch - fat, sweet, raw Hokkaido scallops, on warm vinegary sushi rice, with fresh, REAL wasabi root smeared underneath, and toasted marinated seaweed to wrap each one in and eat like a taco.

Doesn't everyone come home from work on a Monday night and make themselves the Chinese New Year classic, lap mei fun/waxed meat clay pot rice for dinner?? Lup cheong wind-dried sausages, lup yuk Chinese five spice cured and smoked belly bacon, a waxed duck breast, shiitake mushrooms, choy sum greens, Sichuanese preserved salted vegetables (siumiyacai), Shaohsing rice wine, dark soy, sesame oil, white pepper and rice cooked in chicken stock until the bottom's crispy and the top's absorbed all the meat juices. Happy CNY to me and my arteries!

It's an 8 by 8 inch baking tin. It's not terribly deep - maybe 4 inches. Springform would probably work easier but the two overlapping strips of baking paper did ok (and I held the tabs in place with little bulldog clips, not shown!)

Yes, and I always crack open the apricot kernel to get at the sweet kernel and grind it in with the pistachios. Not enough to make anyone, like, sick or anything but just enough to impart that very particular taste..

The beginning of very good things..I like anything that gives me a reason to use a half kilo of fresh roasted pistachios, very ripe apricots, brandy, and a good dollop of the beautiful Iranian pistachio paste I bought at G. Detou in Paris. (Shortbread base, pistachio and brandy frangipane filling, ripe slices apricots nestled in top until they bake up to jammy, caramelly deliciousness)

One upside (for my colleagues) of my everlasting inability to sleep through the night without becoming overwhelmed thinking about the miseries of the world is 2am baking – these are vanilla and lime zest cupcakes, with the innards cut out and filled with a VERY limey and buttery lime curd, and then piped with Swiss meringue and blowtorched.

My normal dry wonton noodle setup made 1000% better by the acquisition (finally!!) of dried prawn roe to sprinkle on the cooked noodles. I've been searching for prawn roe in Sydney for YEARS (it's a very Hong Kong thing and soooo umami/savoury/flavour bomb) and had pretty much given up until I ate at a new new trendoid hipster doofus Chinese place last week and was shocked and thrilled to note that one dish had prawn roe sprinkled on top! So I did what you do in this day and age; friended the chef on Instagram and bugged him till he spilled.

100% would eat.

I can't actually account for how I have any, let alone so many! I certainly wouldn't buy them.

Only OK use of all those interminable candy canes you somehow end up with every Christmas; peppermint bark. One layer of tempered Callebaut dark chocolate spiked with peppermint oil, one layer of Callebaut white spiked with more peppermint, one layer of candy canes I imagined were my enemies and bashed the hell out of with a rolling pin.

I've just read the recipe, have fallen totally in love with it, and an going to try to make it this weekend..did you use a loose-bottomed tart tin? How big? Is it better warm or cold? Any other tips? Thanks!

Bravely dragged myself out of bed to make a wee snack of apricots, brushed in pistachio oil and char grilled before being roasted with honey, vanilla bean, crushed amaretti biscuits, a slug of Amaretto and some flowering thyme. Eaten with a lady-like scoop of pistachio gelato and crushed roasted pistachios. Interestingly, both the amaretti and Amaretto themselves are made from apricot kernels, adding an extra apricotty, slightly almondy note to the whole affair.

From over on the sous vide thread; octopus, sous vided and then brushed in gochujang and honey and chargrilled; Korean multigrain rice, marinated raw octopus kimchi, normal kimchi and roasted nori and perilla leaves for wrapping.

Well, turned out pretty nicely. Not quite as tender as I was hoping, but not chewy.

I'm going to try a giant octopus tentacle today. I've never SV'd octopus before, and most recipes I can find suggest between 75C and 82C for between 5 and 8 hours, but then, most recipes are for whole octopus, baby octopus or smaller tentacles. This, to me, is a pretty big one - about 50 cm end to end and 5 cm thick at its thickest point. I thought I'd try 77C for 5 hours, chill and then brush with Korean gochujang chilli paste and honey, and char grill. Any thoughts/advice on those cooking times/temps?

Tartiflette! Given that it's basically just potatoes, pancetta, caramelised onions, thyme, an entire wheel of Epoisses cheese and half a bottle of Alsace Riesling, there's no way THAT'S going to taste bad.

I had a bit of sweet pastry dough left over from my Christmas mince pie endeavours, and a whole lot of rhubarb to use up, so I made a rhubarb, apricot jam and ginger syrup tart.