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.

The most impressive book on macarons is now in English! Pierre Hermé's 2008 French book "Macaron" is out this month in English.

The vanilla slice is one of those standard, humble Australian bakery items that qualifies as "good old" for its longevity and as "humble" because of its modest level of finesse. But there are mysteries in all this (and questions for readers at the end)... What was your childhood vanilla slice like? Did it have a different name? And how long has it been around?

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.

Five days in Corsica, surrounded by the azure waters of the Mediterranean, dwarfed by mountains and cliffs, eating myself full with sausage and cheese. That was the plan. The food part of it didn't quite come together. I blame the tourists.

Like a gift from the heavens, a PR person offered me frozen pizzas to sample. I'm not the ideal candidate, but with my Duncan's Degustations series underway, how could I resist the opportunity to add to my spectrum of likely-ick experiences? Little did I know I'd end up with a freezer full of Dr Oetker's odd pizzas.

A gorgeous Easter in Melbourne came and went, leaving us full of bready and chocolatey goodness. For me, this Easter brought memories of childhood eggy joy and contemporary disappointment, alongside my special Hot Heathen Buns.

As far as I can recall, I've never voluntarily entered a KFC "restaurant". Occasionally, social pressures mean I have to tag along. Sometimes it means I eat a piece of chicken. If you have to dine in the enemy's clutches, you might as well make it an experiment. As KFC's "The Double" is the latest nutritional-outrage-fuelling fast food product, it seemed like an ideal target for the second epsiode of Duncan's Degustations!