Amaretto tiramisu to kick trifle off your Christmas list

My festive season is always a wonderful mixture of nostalgic celebrations – some timeless societal traditions, plus some more recent personal rituals. Each Christmas eve my former schoolfriends and I are reunited in the same local pub to swap stories of the highs and lows of the past year, and each Christmas morning I awake to discover that the snowman stocking my Mum made me as a baby has been filled with gifts.

Prawn and chorizo paella for one person to enjoy

With my partner away for the weekend, I was struggling to motivate myself into making a real evening meal. Ironically, the thought of just throwing some pasta into a pan and onto a fast boil when I’m preparing a “dinner for one” is even more tempting now that I’m a (relatively) confident cook than it was when I was a (relatively) naive student. A large portion of my love of cooking comes from seeing other people enjoy my food, so the culinary process seems significantly less pleasurable when there’s no-one else around to appreciate my efforts.