I had an appalling dream in which Jeremy Clarkson was now the co-presenter of Newsnight with Pax-Man (both coincidentally shown here in this classic video), and that they were interviewing Piers Morgan. Even in the dream I commented that the mass of concentrated ego was likely to make the room explode, but in real life, I think I'd quite like to see that just for the inevitable hilarious punch-up.

Anyway... I made some coconut biscuits for Whitney's return last weekend. Actually, after looking up the recipes I nearly accidentally made American "coconut biscuits", those things that look like scones but aren't, and I was only when I saw it said they went very well with chicken that I was inspired to change the recipe I was using at the last minute. I also went in to bother people working in the supermarket about "glacé cherries" in the full knowledge that they would have no idea what I was talking about, telling them that I was looking for the kind of cherries you bake with that are glazed and come in a tub - but they eventually found me exactly what I was looking for, here simply called Red Cherries.

They're called Coconut Moments because the appearance was based on a type of biscuit my mother used to make from the Be-Ro Cookbook of the Year 1796 called "Melting Moments". I can't remember if those had coconut in them - if they did, then it follows that these are in fact Melting Moments.

~ Coconut Moments ~

1. Combine 1 1/4 cups of flour, half a teaspoon of baking powder, half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda and a couple of pinches of salt.
2. Pulverize an entire stick of butter (half a cup) together with half a cup of brown sugar and half a cup of white sugar, in a mixer - this will be doing most of the work from now on.
3. Add the contents of an egg, and half a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Keep on beating.
4. Shake the flour mixture from the first step in slowly, letting it mix into the mass evenly.
5. Add 1 1/3 cups of desiccated (Amr: shredded) coconut (Amr: coconut).
6. Have at it for a while yet to get the coconut blended in, then give the mixer a rest.
7. Preheat the oven to 350°F and put the mixture in the fridge while it's at it, to give it a chance to get easier to spoon out.
8. Drop out the dough in teaspoon sizes (slightly smaller than you would expect) on to a baking tray, put them in the oven and watch for them being ready after ten minutes.
9. Slice some glacé cherries down the middle, ready for putting them on the biscuits when they come out.
10. Attack each biscuit by putting a cherry in the middle as soon as they're out of the oven, placing it firmly through the upper layer before they have a chance to start cooling, and the cherry will fuse to the biscuit.
11. Transfer them to a cooling rack after a couple of minutes and send the next lot in.

This recipe has quite a spectacular yield - some of the ones pictured are rather larger than directed in the above recipe and I got 30 out of this batch, but if you kept them down to an inch and a bit across each, I think that you could achieve fifty biscuits. But I guarantee that they'll disappear pretty quickly.