How to make Mary Berry's easy one-pot chicken and red velvet sandwich cake
Dame Mary Berry at 88: ‘I don’t want to retire at all – I love what I do’
Mary Berry says she still has a “passion” for cookery and isn’t planning to hang up her apron any time soon.
“I don’t want to retire at all. I have a passion for what I do and I love teaching,” says the former Great British Bake Off judge, 88, who began her TV cooking career in the early 1970s.
“I mean, I’ve got wonderful health… I’m really lucky. I love what I do.”
Born in Bath, she moved to London aged 21 and studied part-time at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu culinary school, alongside jobs, doing cookery demonstrations and recipe testing.
“I’ve always worked very hard, early on taking any work that came my way,” says Berry, who married Paul Hunnings in 1966. The couple have two children, Annabel and Thomas (their other son William died aged 19).
“I worked in a butcher, I worked in a fishmonger, I worked during the night when I was on a holiday in a bakery that made wonderful bread. My husband was with the two children while I worked.”
After becoming food editor at now-defunct Housewife Magazine, then Ideal Home (which is still going strong), Berry published her debut cookbook in 1970 and landed her first TV gig shortly after.
“My first TV cooking was with Judy Chalmers on Good Afternoon and I did farmhouse cooking,” Berry recalls.
“I like to think that television is the best way of teaching to a very large audience. I want to inspire people to enjoy cooking more.”
Quickly proving popular with viewers, she remained a fixture on TV screens over the next four decades, joining Paul Hollywood as a Bake Off judge from 2010 to 2016.
“Of course you need the backup of a book,” Berry continues, nudging the conversation back to the topic at hand, her latest recipe book, Mary Makes it Easy.
“I like to feel that with a book I’m holding somebody’s hand who is a little bit nervous and trying a recipe the first time, and I want them to have real success.”
Something in the region of her 96th cookbook (the exact total appears to be lost in the sands of time), it’s all about simplicity, with a focus on one-pot wonders (like chicken tartiflette or meatball toad in the hole), quick dinners you can prepare in advance (veggie bolognese; humble pie) and freezable sweets (elderflower and lemon traybake; maple and orange pudding).
“We all want something easy, don’t we?” says Berry, who admits even she still has the occasional slip-up in the kitchen.
“I forget to put the timer on, I take things out too soon, all the things a housewife – or whoever’s doing the cooking – [might do]. We all make mistakes.”
Having experienced times when cash was tight, the frugal foodie has lots of advice for home cooks who want to cut costs.
“It’s all about planning,” says Berry, who is a big fan of doubling up on recipes and freezing half for a later date.
“The freezer is like a second larder if you label things properly. I write, say, ‘roasted vegetable lasagna, very good’ and I may even put in my diary when I’m going to use it.”
As well as a culinary career spanning six decades, Berry has been happily married for 67 years. What’s her secret to a harmonious home?
“Well, you know in my day you got married for richer or for poorer, till death us do part, which to me is very important,” the octogenarian says.
“We don’t have arguments, I just go in the garden or the greenhouse if he’s annoying me. Try and never go to bed on an argument,” she advises.
And count your blessings: “I’m immensely grateful still to have him. Many of my friends haven’t got their husbands.” Recently, some of Berry’s 1970s TV demonstrations have found a new audience on TikTok, with quaint clips showing her making the trendiest dishes of the day, like chicken stroganoff, ox tongue (“such a lovely idea for a picnic”) and sherry trifle – not that she would know.
“I have no idea. I don’t do social things like TikTok, I don’t do Twitter,” says Berry (her assistant Lucy runs an Instagram account on behalf of the pair.)
“It’s very nice that people are enjoying the early ones.” She gently admonishes me when I confess that I’ve never sampled tongue: “You can buy it ready sliced in the supermarket. Have you never had it? You’re a foodie…
“I like it very much, my husband does, too. We have it occasionally. It’s more reasonable than having ham.”
Having seen many a food fad come and go, the one she struggled to get on board with the most was nouvelle cuisine, aka “little bits of something on a plate”.
“All the chefs were doing it and I remember well my mother, I think it was her 100th birthday, and we went to a very posh restaurant, it was nouvelle cuisine,” Berry recalls.
“I can remember the plates arriving for my brothers and my cousins. My mother got hold of the waiter and said, ‘That’s not enough for a man!’ And she was quite right.”
Mary Berry’s easy-peasy one-pot chicken
With rich tomato sauce and roasted vegetables, this makes for a warming winter supper.
Servings
6Preparation Time
20 minsCooking Time
1 hours 5 minsTotal Time
1 hours 25 minsCourse
MainIngredients
2 tbsp olive oil
1 large onion, thinly sliced
1 large fennel bulb, thinly sliced
1 red pepper, deseeded and diced
3 large garlic cloves, finely grated
100ml (3½fl oz) white wine
1 x 400g tin chopped tomatoes
2 tbsp sun-dried tomato paste
2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1 small whole chicken
(about 1.25kg/2lb 12oz)
5 bay leaves
1 lemon, thinly sliced into rounds
1 tsp paprika
1 tbsp runny honey
Method
Preheat the oven to 200°C/180°C Fan/Gas 6.
Heat the oil in a deep lidded casserole or large, lidded, ovenproof frying pan over a high heat. Add the onion, fennel and pepper and fry for about 3–4 minutes, stirring regularly. Add the garlic and fry for 30 seconds. Pour in the wine and boil to reduce by half.
Stir in the chopped tomatoes, sun-dried tomato paste and Worcestershire sauce, and season with salt and black pepper.
Meanwhile, put the chicken upside down on a board. Remove the backbone by cutting either side of the bone with scissors. Turn over and press down on the breastbone to flatten the bird; it is now a spatchcock chicken. Arrange the lemon slices and bay leaves over the chicken.
Put the chicken, breast-side up, on top of the vegetables in the casserole or frying pan. Season and bring up to the boil. Cover with a lid and transfer to the preheated oven for about 35 minutes.
Remove the lid and sprinkle the paprika over the chicken and drizzle with the honey. Return to the oven, uncovered, for about 30 minutes to brown and finish cooking.
To serve, spoon the vegetables on to a hot platter and joint or carve the chicken before arranging the chicken on top of the vegetables.
Mary Berry’s red velvet sandwich cake
This double-layered chocolate sponge is iced with vanilla buttercream.
Servings
10Preparation Time
40 minsCooking Time
30 minsTotal Time
1 hours 10 minsCourse
BakingIngredients
Butter, for greasing
250g (9oz) plain flour
1 tbsp cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
250g (9oz) light muscovado sugar
200ml (⅓ pint) buttermilk
150ml (¼ pint) sunflower oil
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tbsp red food colouring gel or about ¼ tsp food colouring paste
2 large eggs
8 white chocolate truffle balls, to decorate
For the buttercream icing:
250g (9oz) butter, softened
2 tsp vanilla extract
300g (10½oz) icing sugar
250g (9oz) full-fat mascarpone cheese
Method
Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C Fan/Gas 4. Grease and line the bases of 2×20cm (8in) sponge sandwich tins with non-stick baking paper.
Measure the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and sugar into a bowl and mix well.
Mix the buttermilk, oil, vanilla, food colouring and 100ml (3½fl oz) water in a jug. Add the eggs and whisk until smooth. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and whisk until combined. The mixture should be bright red; it will get a little darker as it cooks. If it’s not as vivid as you’d like, add a touch more colouring.
Divide the mixture evenly between the two prepared tins and level the surfaces. Bake in the preheated oven for about 25–30 minutes, or until well risen and shrinking away from the sides of the tins. Cool in the tins for 10 minutes, then turn out, peel off the paper and leave to cool completely on a wire rack.
To make the buttercream icing, place the soft butter and vanilla extract in a large bowl and sift in half the icing sugar. Mix with an electric whisk until smooth. Sift in the remaining icing sugar and mix again. Add the mascarpone to the bowl and gently stir with a spatula until smooth (don’t beat with a whisk as it may split). Put a fluted nozzle in a piping bag and spoon about 150g (5oz) of the buttercream into the bag.
To assemble the cake, sit one of the sponges on a cake plate and spread a third of the buttercream over the cake, then sit the other cake on top. Ice the cake by first spreading a thin layer of icing – a crumb coat – over the whole cake before chilling for 30 minutes. Then pile the remaining icing from the bowl on top and spread over the top and around the edges to completely cover the cake.
Make sure that the icing is smooth around the edges before starting to create lines up the sides. Using a small palette knife, make wide lines up the sides and swirl the top. Pipe a rope design around the edge of the top of the cake and decorate with the eight chocolate truffles to finish.
- Mary Makes it Easy is published by BBC Books. Photography by Laura Edwards. Available now.
