Having not seen our pudding club friends for ages, and what with me being on half term and them still working full time, we went to see them this evening taking both courses.

A couple of weeks ago, we gave away a dozen eggs after we had managed to build up a bit of a stock. Since then we have more or less been keeping on top of the girls’ production.

But every now and again it helps to have a meal that gets through quite a lot of them. So this evening, six of us ate 9 eggs in two custard-based dishes: a quiche and a crème caramel.

The quiche was essentially this recipe: Smoked Mackerel and Cheddar Quiche and was completely delicious. I substituted a leek fried in butter for the spring onions, made my own pastry with dried Italian herbs, used own label mature cheddar and slightly less cream, and it was very well received.

My other favourite thing to do with smoked mackerel is this warm mackerel potato salad.

The crème caramel was à la Dan Lepard.