Secret Recipe

How often do schools produce recipe books for charity, filled with parents' offerings with their versions on the national/cultural dish they have grown up with, made "with their secret recipe"? Sometimes I will buy one - what's a quid after all if it's for a good cause (though these days they are getting pretty pricey, somewhat ironic as chances are I'll find these recipes on the internet, set out on a food blog that looks suspiciously like mine, for example). And looking through them I will be awed by the bravery of so many people who will play around with a time honoured balance of ingredients. If you have a mathematician's mind, then the idea that you would mess with a carefully balanced set of ingredients designed to promote a specific chemical reaction, the idea that you might chuck in an extra ingredient, "just to see how it tastes", would be abhorrent. So I'm going to say that those who experiment with the received wisdom of food writers, are the creative thinkers of this world, the ones who will take risks on the basis of nothing more than their imagination - or their gut instinct (ho ho). Recently I was trying out a recipe by a very well known food writer - a household name in fact - and I couldn't get it to work. I tried it a few times, chucked out the appalling mess I had created (it would have tasted pretty good with custard dumped on it, which would also have hidden the mess - but I hadn't made it to eat, I was trying to Learn A Skill!!) when it occurred to me that just possibly, the food writer, my guru of gurus, had quite possibly Got It Wrong. Maybe an editing error. Or the amounts had not been double checked. I reduced the amount of water and hey presto. The perfect chocolate praline loaf cake. It was like a bolt of lightning. Food writers Are Human, and their cookery books are Not Perfect. Which means, they can be improved upon. A week later, I tried my hand at a chocolate mousse cake. Putting the ingredients together, I thought to myself, what if I substituted the recommended alcohol for another? What if I made the top layer with white chocolate instead of dark, what if I used redcurrant instead of raspberries...once I'd started, I couldn't stop. It was like a release from Colditz. I made my mousse cake and I'll be honest - it looked a bit odd. Tasted amazing, so my creativity matched up to my execution, but I needed to work on my presentation. I was a bit dizzy for days afterwards. Years I'd spent carefully making sure I kept within the boundaries, and the turn I'd taken - the "what if" - felt like nothing would be the same again. And it really isn't. Although the cakes, pies and puddings I'm making, the biscuits I'm cutting and the dough I am kneading all come out looking like, well, cakes and pies and puddings, biscuits and bread, they are just a bit more special - for each one,  I can now say, hand on heart, that I have made them with my Secret Recipe. A few months more and I could be producing charity cookbooks all on my own. Right, must sign off. I'm off to make my Secret Recipe broccoli and palm heart dolcelatte quiche.