Spice up your life! 17 soups with a kick – from chicken curry laksa to roast pumpkin

Technically, many soups are spiced in some way, even if it’s just with pepper. But we all know what is meant by a spiced soup: something with a jolt to it, and a bit of heat to warm up a winter evening. When it comes to soup, spice is the ultimate companion to a main ingredient that may otherwise be considered boring or bland. In this sense, the spices are the most important component: they are what the soup will taste of.But which spices go with which ingredients, and how? Here are 17 different recipes to help you figure that out

Helen Goh’s recipe for Valentine’s chocolate pots de creme for two | The sweet spot

These chocolate pots are dark, silken and softly bitter, with enough richness to feel a little decadent, but not heavy. Make one to share or two individual ones, depending on your mood. They can be made ahead, anywhere from an hour to a full day in advance, and will keep happily in the fridge. If they’ve been chilled for more than a couple of hours, let them sit at room temperature for about 20 minutes before serving. They should feel cool against the spoon, but not fridge-cold, which dulls their luxurious texture

Craft beer has gone stale: let’s hear it for age-old favourites | Richard Godwin

The writer Vladimir Nabokov was extremely particular when it came to language, and rather more basic when it came to sustenance: “My habits are simple, my tastes banal,” he once told an interviewer. “I would not exchange my favourite fare (bacon and eggs, beer) for the most misspelt menu in the world.”I’ve often thought of this as I’ve perused misspelt beer menus over the years, wondering what Nabokov would make of all the hazy dubble IPAs and triple brown mocha porters, because, over the course of what we might have to label the “craft era”, beer has become anything but simple. You may well have lamented this, too, especially if you’ve ever been cornered by an enthusiast at a party. India pale ale (IPA), for example, which was once a distinctly British style of ale designed for export, has, in the hands of American craft brewers, become a sort of standard-bearer for complicated beer: aggressively hopped, often startlingly bitter and/or sour, and redolent of a bygone era of millennial hipster striving

What a ​four-​year-​old ​taught ​us ​about the ​magic of ​baking​ a chocolate ​cake

Valentine’s is on the horizon, which means we are about to officially enter chocolate cake season – that soft-focus part of winter when confectionery and romance blur together. For our four-year-old goddaughter, it is always that time of year. Just hearing the two words together makes her roll her eyes and roll out her little tongue in anticipation of pleasure, like a cartoon kid. When we told her we would come and bake a chocolate cake with her, there were squeals of joy.Settling on a recipe was the first challenge – Ravneet Gill’s fudgy one, Felicity Cloake’s perfect one and Benjamina Ebuehi’s traybaked one were all contenders

Rachel Roddy’s recipe for pork ragu with herbs (for gnocchi or pasta) | A kitchen in Rome

It’s 10.30am and steam carrying the smell of onions, beans, cabbage and braised meat escapes from the kitchen in the corner of box 37 on Testaccio market. In the small kitchen is Leonardo Cioni, a tall chef from San Giovanni Valdarno, midway between Florence and Arezzo, who, for the past three-and-a-half years, has run box 37 as Sicché Roba Toscana, which roughly translates as “therefore Tuscan stuff”. The escaping steam is effective advertising, leading eyes to the blackboard above the counter to discover exactly what is going on in the back.Always on the menu is lampredotto

Rich plums and ripe tomatoes: Australia’s best-value fruit and veg for February

Tomatoes ripe for cooking, cheap watermelon and cucumbers for $2 a piece – but it’s the final call for apricots, cherries and mangoesGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailJuicy watermelon, deep-purple plums and ripe roma tomatoes are some of the vibrant fruit and veg highlights this month, says Graham Gee, senior buyer at the Happy Apple in Melbourne.“Tomatoes are plentiful, in particular the saucing varieties,” he says. “Roma varieties are sold nice and ripe, ready to make passata.” Cooking tomatoes are roughly $2 a kilo at the Happy Apple, with Australian field tomatoes going for about $5 a kilo in supermarkets.Watermelon is “very cheap”, says Michael Hsu, operational manager at Sydney’s Panetta Mercato