Novelty cakes

Or rather, cakes have become less of a novelty. I have now completed the beginner and intermediate courses in cake decoration at Trafford College, run by Pauline and Rachel of PR Design A Cake. It's been running since January, it's cost me £400 (so far - the advanced course starts in May) and it's been fascinating. I've met some lovely people, including Sarah Taylor of Taylor Made Cupcakes, who is shit hot and puts us all to shame every week.

So far I have made and decorated: a Christmas cake (Rachel didn't like the Ice, Ice, Baby pun and I don't blame her), a Hello Kitty plaque, marzipan fruits, cupcakes (iced with buttercream made with margarine, as disgusting as it sounds), a pierrot face, a basket filled with flowers, an icing greetings card with flowers poking out, a razz-whore 'ballerina' cake with an air of the Jordans thanks to the use of lustre dust and a race track cake complete with a Michelin man overlooking proceedings.

In my own time, I've done a giant cupcake (from royal wedding cake-maker Fiona Cairns' pretty if flawed book Bake and Decorate), a double-decker first birthday cake for Franklin and his friends, a tower of 100 cupcakes for a baptism, and a bunnies in bed cake for my sister, who shares my memories of the one mum made for us.

Today, I didn't really work. I made a big panda cake instead. Unbelieveably, I'm still quite enjoying myself. Roll on Advanced Cake Icing and Decorating.

Cicchetti: small but acceptably formed

Since Frank's arrival I have come to understand the wonders of small things. This bodes well for Cicchetti, which is not small, but serves little dishes.

Outpourings of wonder have accompanied a rash of recent openings (mainly in London, but also, briefly by the looks of it, in Plymouth) in the style of the Venetian bacaro. They serve small sharing plates, Italian tapas if you will, and Manchester's very own version is owned and run by the recession-bucking, celeb-wooing, slightly swaggering Italian chain, San Carlo. It's in House of Fraser, near the handbags.

As Cicchetti's man in charge recently told Matt White and his Gourmet Night on BBC Radio Manchester (on which I will appear on Thursday, discussing cookbooks), they've spent a fortune on it. Presumably deliberately, the grey-and-white marble and long bar gives it an air of old-fashioned, Seventies-style sexiness, and the coffee machine looks like a motorbike. And the other identifying mark? It's packed, pretty much all the time.

A friend had predicted (though not to my face, the scoundrel) that I wouldn't like it, citing terrible service. The floor staff are fine, if a bit dazed looking; the managers are filthy rude. But when the thrill of having someone's back turned to you pales, there's an unwieldy but possibility-laden menu to read. Some dishes come from the deli-style display of meats, salads and bits and pieces at the front, there's bruschetta, meat, pasta and gnocchi to contend with, and there's a bit of gueridon theatre in the form of steak or tuna tartare prepared at the table.

It wasn't a great show - the waiter doing the steak-seasoning was a beginner, being instructed by a distracted senior person, neither of them keen to engage - but it involved my lovely cheffy friend Deanna Thomas's favourite bit of lunch, a smoky-hot tomato sauce made with the spicy sausage nduja. The deep-fried squid could have been crisper and the slow-cooked short ribs considerably less sweet, but I will brook no argument about the magnificence of gnocchi, even very average gnocchi, served double-cheesy with a gorgonzola sauce and in a Parmesan basket (what did I say about the Seventies?). Marinated vegetables, including some very good grilled aubergine slices, weren't bad either. At £15 a head (no booze, just fizzy water), it was an acceptable, accessible - by which I mean cheapish - lunch.

Nevertheless, my friend was right. Despite the buzz and the extreme cheese, I didn't like it very much. Unless you are a person known to the establishment, you are likely to feel as welcome in Cicchetti as a passenger does on a bus. They're not really that bothered whether you're on board or not, because they'd be doing the route anyway. What's the Italian for 'small shrug'?

In conversation: Anthony Bourdain and Fergus Henderson

Last night at the Lowry hotel was an unusually rock'n'roll proposition, with Anthony Bourdain and Fergus Henderson (who are friends) on stage to discuss fast food, bone marrow and the democratisation of fine dining. The hook was Bourdain's new book Medium Raw and the event was organised by Manchester Food and Drink Festival. After a long lunch at the Mark Addy with the chefs, festival director Phil Jones was irretrievably drunk, leaving it to compere Mark Garner to keep control.

Bourdain is a brilliant quote machine, and by the time he's finished his UK junket you might have heard his talkytalk more than once, but live, it was good stuff. He describes his transition from grunt cook to the 'celebrity chef author scam business' as both weird and ludicrously fantastic. 'I don't think writing is good for anybody,' he said, dapper in cowboy boots. 'They're nasty, angry people. But I don'tmiss the [kitchen] work.' As the father of a three-year-old, he's had to confront the childish longing for the consistency and security of fast food. 'How do we break their evil grip on our children? A person might suggest that Ronald McDonald has been implicated in the disappearance of a number of small children.'

He also brought news of how New York restaurants are adapting to the challenges of recession. 'Overnight, people lost fortunes, and the cost of ingredients has skyrocketed. That changed the game. Restaurants have become much nicer and cut out all of the bullshit. They have to be pleasant when you call for a table. And it has forced chefs to move in a direction they wanted to move in anyway, cooking more shin and head and less filet mignon. Fine dining should be fun. If you're dressing up for your waiter, something is really wrong.'

Henderson was brought on for the traditional hero-worship from Bourdain, who describes himself as 'still a fanboy' in awe of the chefs he's now mates with. 'You have to understand,' he said, turning earnestly to Fergus, 'the effect of the book [Nose to Tail Eating] on the food world was electric. Rich people are now paying for food that poor people used to have to eat. And you'll never get away from the fucking bone marrow dish. It'll be on your headstone.'

When it came to questions, it was clear how much of an inspiration both Bourdain and Henderson are to the industry -one 'F'n'B guy' in the crowd maintained that there are chefs who read Kitchen Confidential daily, and general warmth for Henderson was maintained even after he explained that dog isn't nice to eat because it congeals really quickly. The reason dog was brought into it? Manners. Bourdain says, 'I'm a good guest. If you offer me something [even a platter of puppy heads] I'm going to be appreciative.'

Can you smell bacon?

I have a feeling Tim spent most of our visit to the Wirral Food and Drink Festival with one eye on the police on duty, hoping they'd stand next to Shaw Meats so he could do his bacon joke. That didn't happen, but our utility room does smell of bacon, because we've hung a hunk of their Cumbrian pancetta above the washing machine so that the air can get to it. It beats Fairy.

The Wirral fest, held at Claremont Farm, has been going for five years, and it's grown hugely since the first one, where I mumbled my way through a talk about what it's like to be a restaurant critic (answer: fattening). I know the farm well because it's where chef and good egg Brian Mellor has his cookery school, and Andrew Pimbley, the famously fanciable farmer, has kindly contributed to more asparagus features than I care to remember. This year there were two demo stages, a loud folk band and a huge beer tent as well around 100 exhibitors. What was very noticeable was - and this might sound a bit off - the crowd. At a lot of these things there are just hands blindly grabbing the samples and disappearing without so much as a by-your-leave. People are rude, they don't buy much and they don't even seem to particularlylike food. Here, everyone was asking questions, tasting with interest, giving it a bit of the old please and thank you and, crucially, putting their hands in their pockets.


We came away with a haul including but not limited to chicken liver pate from Katie's Proper Pate, some Wirral watercress, lovely organic vine tomatoes, a couple of steak burgers, strawberries, kippers straight from the on-site mini smoker, a great loaf of sourdough from this lot and sweetcorn from the inimitable Vorn the Corn, who laughs fruitily when he hands a cob over to the ladies, growling, "I thought size didn't matter?". And, of course, the pancetta, which you can smell before you see.

Field of dreams

If your dreams involve raspberry sponge with white chocolate icing and pink wafer roses, that is. And whose don't?

Gregg Wallace: what a pudding

Gregg Wallace was to be heard giving Libby Purves plenty of sugary love on Radio 4's Midweek last Wednesday, which coincided with the thump of a new book, Gregg's Favourite Puddings, on the Hale and Hearty doormat. The baldy one is much associated with dessert, and the new collection contains 106 recipes for them, with cheery intros from the man himself.

Judging by the small print, it would be doing Gregg a kindness to describe the recipes as his. Some of the recipes in Gregg's Favourite Puddings have appeared before in other books published by Hamlyn, and since Wallace's other books are about veg and published by Mitchell Beazley (same publishing group, different imprint), I'm thinking he didn't spend hours slaving over rather housewifely recipes for strawberry crumble flan or chocolate roulade. I looked into the author absence issue for Fire & Knives recently, so I know what goes on, and I'm not entirely comfortable with it.

Nevertheless, we had friends staying, I had a new baking book, and the rest was inevitable. After a just-serviceable foray into 'his' take on the famous Portuguese custard tarts, I was looking for something more reliable from the book. On page 44, of the New York cheesecake, Gregg observes "I just can't help myself. Every time I see one I think of tall buildings and hum Gershwin." I couldn't help myself either. It's a simple recipe which uses a kilo of cream cheese and plenty of sour cream, but which is, unsettlingly, stabilised with flour. I expected its presence to be horribly obvious, but what we got was a decent texture and rich-but-clean, slightly lemony flavour. Without the involvement of a bain marie the cheesecake developed a deep three-crevasse split which looked like a T and gave Tim the right to demand the first slice. He needn't have rushed in: since the recipe serves 10, we'll be singing Gershwin every time we open the fridge.

Also...cakes again

It will not come as a surprise that I have been making more cakes. My friend's daughter Nancy is being christened at the weekend and the little lady and her mum Liz came round to pick their favourites from trial batches of lemon, raspberry and white chocolate, coconut and vanilla cupcakes to be served at the do. The recipes are all from the Primrose Bakery cookbook and, mercifully, they all work. Raspberry and white chocolate, with a spoonful of jam slipped into the cake under icing that's a cross between vanilla buttercream and white chocolate ganache, won the day. The ones in the picture look at bit playschool, but once I've applied 25 pairs of icing feet, some pink wafer roses and pearly pink sugar spheres to Saturday's lot, they're going to be pretty impressive.