Cheese Please! My new book is almost here – and I’ve brought pudding

I’m so excited that my cheese book, Cheese Please!, is finally set to enter the wild. It will be published in the UK, US and Australia around 13 August, but you can order it now and please, please can I implore you to do this? It really does help nudge sales along if there are strong orders before the official release. It’s packed with more than 90 recipes involving cheese in all its marvellous forms: fresh, melted, bubbling, crisp-edged, whipped, baked and sweet. Just click here to buy it in your part of the world! In the meantime, you’ll find a taster recipe from the book below, along with some ideas for using one of my very favourite cheeses.

I’m aware that cheese in all its glory might not be on your radar just now if you’re dealing with the northern hemisphere heat. Many of us consider cheese a cosy-weather food, to be eaten after a hearty meal with a glass of red wine (although I prefer it with white), or scoffed stringy and gooey in a gorgeous bake when it’s cold and damp. Huzzah for all of that, obviously, but can I argue strongly that cheese should have a big place in your summer eating plans too? As evidence for the defence, may I present goat’s cheese.

Today’s recipe, taken from my book, is an utterly sublime and very easy goat’s cheese semifreddo (aka, the easiest possible ice cream to make, with no machinery or skill necessary) which I’ve paired with vanilla-roasted strawberries. Banish any notion right now that it will taste of the farmyard. The cheese brings a clear but discreet prickle of tang and acidity, which stops the semifreddo becoming cloying and makes the strawberries taste even more intensely of strawbs. It is creamy, lightly tangy and gorgeous - even my husband ADORES this and he generally think cheese in sweet things contravenes the laws of nature.

I actually think goat’s cheese is widely misunderstood. Some versions are intensely pungent, either because they’re meant to be (personally, I adore the pong) or, according to The World Encyclopedia of Cheese, because the milk has been handled badly. But that’s hardly the whole family.

At its youngest and simplest, goat’s cheese is fresh, rindless and soft, sometimes sold as curd and sometimes shaped into small rounds or logs. It tends to be mild, moist and lemony, and this is the sort used in today’s semifreddo. Then there are soft-ripened or bloomy-rinded goat’s cheeses, including the familiar logs, often called bûches in France, with a white mould rind and an interior that grows softer and more savoury as it matures. Some are coated in ash, while others are aged for longer until firm, nutty and grateable. Quite distinct from the white, bloomy-rinded cheeses are washed-rind varieties, whose rinds are bathed in brine or another liquid as they mature, encouraging stronger aromas and more pungent flavours. There are even goat’s milk blues. In other words, the flavours run from fresh cream and meadow herbs to mushrooms, nuts, pepper and damp cellars. There is a goat’s cheese for almost every cheese-eating occasion, including pudding, as I hope today’s recipe proves.