One of my greatest fears when someone asks me to cook with them is the prospect of blunt knives in their kitchen. I hate being asked to finely slice an onion or trim a piece of meat with a large dull-edged kitchen knife. Ugh. I believe I've once successfully nagged a friend into getting some decently sharp knives.

Ten months after I last donned my patissier gear and squeezed out a few hundred macarons, I returned to the piping bags for a brief baking blitz. My back hurt for two weeks. So then I made a cake instead.

Have you ever met one of those people who looks ascance at you when you suggest having an ice-cream in winter? "But it's 8 degrees and raining!" they exclaim. So bloody what? Of courrrrrrrrrrse you should eat it all year round. So here we are at the winter solstice (in the southern hemisphere) and I decided to do a flavour that straddles ideas of cold and wishes for warmer weather.

You might already have read about my travails with kitchen scales. It's time to write a bit more, this time testing out a model submitted to me for review. The Soehnle Cuisina proves to be worthy of interest if you're in the market for new scales, though not outdoing my favourite IKEA scales for accuracy.

I can feel myself approaching an equipment crisis. My favourite food processor is no longer sold in Australia and spare parts are crazy expensive. My kitchen scales are on the way out. My new spatulas bend too much. And just recently I lost the paddle for my ice cream maker. All such things are discovered at the least convenient moments, and the last two had to happen as I was making a delicious chocolate ice cream.

How hard is it to make a set of consumer digital kitchen scales that are reliable? Too hard, it seems.

In this article I write a little about some scales I tried and wonder what my readers have found to be reliable. There's also a list of the criteria I use in trying to choose good digital kitchen scales.

In this tale of Family Circle, crème brûlées and billowing smoke, learn how my Parisian correspondent worked through his custardy obsession to deliver a how-to guide to burnt sugar custard for Syrup & Tang's readers.

Last year I came across a recipe for Korean-style oven-browned short ribs in one of my favourite meat books. It sounded very tasty, braising tasty beef with ginger, garlic and other flavourings to produce something deeply delicious. The outcome was nothing short of heaven. Fatty heaven, but heaven nonetheless. If you haven't cooked beef this way, I highly recommend it.