Get me. I'm boiling milk for Pots au Chocolat. This is the kid friendly pudding for Burns Night. The grown ups are having Cranachan.

A late night sweep round Tesco has me surrounded by many many tubs of double cream, and vanilla, slabs of chocolate, a bottle of whisky and butter. One look in my shopping basket could have given a nutritionist a heart attack.
It's OK; there are no nutritionists in Cheesetown.

Step one on the Pots au Chocolate: bring cream and milk to the boil. And Proust got this thing right - a smell and a taste can take you right back. Watching the bubbles around the edge of the pan of milk I remember making coffee for my dad. "Coffee" was one of the first things I was taught to make. Coffee in those days was boiled milk poured over Nescafe granules. Three spoonfuls of sugar for my dad. Made it every night for him. He wasn't going to sleep at night anyways.

The trick was to catch the milk just as it was boiling up - made it frothy you see.

Cranachan is made by adding malt whisky to whipped cream. Whisky was Wayne's drink. The smell of it takes me right back to the whisky tasting sessions in Aberdeen; nights finishing off a bottle of Laphroaig with Paul and El Rocko; Talisker (mutually agreed to be the best malt) finished in Madrid (because a job worth doing...etc), and the all day walk to get to the distillery on Skye.

My dad died over 20 years ago before I was grown up enough to say sorry. He was 60.
Wayne died over a year ago before I could make it alright again.

Call this Auld Lang Syne then.