PEANUT BUTTER MILLET CHEESECAKE

Sometimes you find yourself facing one of those cheesecake situations; and sometimes bucketfuls of cashews, or Londonfuls of them, give you a stomach ache that makes you question your chances of survival, and you consider tofu instead, and remote islands, or give it a Japanese twist and go for seaweed powder and loss in translation, or perhaps yoghurt or coconut oil or frozen bananas or cauliflower or the Land of Oz; and the options are so many and the fear of the unset so unbearable and you’re almost tempted to sack it off altogether and sit on the kitchen counter and eat sprinkles on toast until further notice; and in the end you find yourself whipping up cheesecakes out of millet and dates and peanut butter just for practice, and when you head to the fridge and casually grab a slice and eat it, your surprise could almost equal that of a little kid whose flying house accidentally squashes a wicked witch to death, as, geographical metaphors aside, you come to the realisation you’ve just made the best cheesecake you’ve ever had, and it's fair to say you've had a few.

PEANUT PUMPKIN CREAM BISCUITS

It’s ever so tiring to play the part of the child prodigy for half a week and to dress up in rotation in all the different best versions of yourself that people kindly plan on turning you into (it must be on the top 5 list of mankind’s charity goals for 2015); especially when you have since the very start taken an oath to not wear leggings as trousers in the outside world, thanks for trying, and the only thing you can possibly share with Kim Kardashian is olaplex, because your hairdresser Sam is a star like that.

In such cases, the recommended course of action is as follows:

1) do pick one of these bragged-about best-version onesies to try on, even if it’s just in the fitting room. You’ll know which one you like best when it’s a smiley one (and when someone sings a song and you can sing along cause you remember the lyrics from your childhood);

2) partake in this special-child pantomime, fine; but only if you are rewarded with couscous, sticks of rock, peanuts and/or other types of valuable goods.

This point is least painful to follow if there is some sort of vague evidence of you actually being all prodigious like that – perhaps a metaphysical entity called Ninety-Nine Jam Jars; or just James;

which leads us to point number three:

3) keep writing humourous handover notes at work, as someone may read them on the train home and secretly smile; speak Italian; daydream about Canadian raw vegan restaurants and shoe shops between a sales training PowerPoint slide and the next; jump on a bus to Hackney like the old times just to get hold of a pack of peanut flour, to go join the other forty-five types of flour you already have in your cupboard (this also means you’re entitled to cake for dinner, and a decaf-almond-milk-latte-please, and some puzzled looks from the barista); sip coffee in the park and talk about dolphins whilst people dismantle the office; and bake. Bake some peanut pumpkin cream sandwich biscuits, because you woke up one morning to find that autumn was there, and got all inspired by a place you can’t wait to visit. They will also provide you with all the energy you need to make your best prodigy child impression. Tried and tested.

PEANUT MUDDY BUDDIES

Life sometimes assumes the form of a weird tragicomedy in multiple acts, one of those ones where the characters are impeccably dressed but wear funny shoes and constantly use puns and say the word amazing one time too many and compliment each other’s hair (not yours).

In cases like this, it may happen that you more or less suddenly just lose the plot.

Whether this is irreversible or not, it’s too early to say; but warning signs in no particular order include having three-and-a-half-hour motion graphics tutorials on Thursday nights to learn how to bring into existence videos of hand-drawn badgers performing an eternal dance on the screen of an anachronistic Victorian cinema, saving them as looping GIFs named ‘badgerLove5’ (it did take 5 attempts. After Effects wouldn’t accept the fact that it had to be forever), and finally publishing them on a vegan baking blog because it makes perfect sense to feature a dancing badger called James side by side with ninety-one respectable recipes of egg-and-dairy-free cake (fine, no honey either); also going food shopping for the week and coming back with two monster jars of peanut butter, a pack of gum and a box of cereal; and spending sunny Saturday afternoons handcrafting heart-shaped peanut butter chips from cocoa butter because who gives a duck about having a pool.

But then again, when the aforementioned jars of peanut butter and the aforementioned box of cereal and last but not least the homemade peanut butter chips with an embarrassing shape are finally put to good use (on a sunny Sunday afternoon) and they turn into some badass nutty Muddy Buddies, you just end up munching on them peacefully sitting on your sofa and secretly imagine their name being pronounced condescendingly with an upper middle class accent, and you also come to the conclusion that after all you don’t really mind having lost the plot, if this means that you get to write your own new one, where at this one unforeseen point in the story two people wake to find each other on the very same page.

PEANUT BUTTER MUFFINS

My detox diet after the enormous quantities of sugar-coated poison I ingurgitated during the holidays was going really well until PEANUT BUTTER MUFFINS.

APRICOT & GOJI BERRY PUFFED RICE BARS

These could be considered a fancy version of kitchen-sink bars. After a disastrous attempt at making vegan white chocolate cookies with a veeery watery fake white chocolate bar the other night, I ran out of flour, oil and pretty much everything you need to bake something edible. However, upon inspecting the kitchen cupboard looking for treats yesterday evening after work (I did find treats by the way. And consequently ate the treats. A lot of them. BAD), I also discovered a sad-looking pack of puffed rice lying there at the back, together with two little bags of equally sad-looking dried apricots. I also had a pack of goji berries, and I actually had been looking for some nice recipe to use them in. Add an opened jar of peanut butter and ta-daah. Mission accomplished. No more abandoned puffed rice. No more forgotten dried apricots. This has cleared some space in my cupboard (and officially allows me to refill it asap), and after throwing everything in a pan (everything but the kitchen sink, as they say), has brought to life some lovely, quite healthy puffed rice bars, which are also vegan and gluten free. I can’t really complain, can I! Should you want to experiment with these bars yourselves, feel free to throw in whatever you have in your cupboard (yeh ok, within reason): dried fruit/nuts of any kind all work a treat (!) here.