As a weekend job it was great, but JR wasn’t sure the kitchen offered him the kind of career trajectory that suited him best. When he finished school, he accepted a place to study natural science at Trinity College Dublin. Those taxis to Ballymaloe would have to stop. He discussed his new life with Myrtle, Ballymaloe’s founder chef, and reached a compromise with her, whereby he would return each summer and Christmas during his degree course to cook in her kitchens. “By the time I was twenty-one, I had been working the peak season in the restaurant’s pastry kitchen for six years,” he remarks. This is a pretty forgiving recipe, and while I haven’t tested it with gluten-free flour or corn or potato starch, I’m sure it would work with any of them. Generally, you want to use half the amount of corn or potato starch when using it to replace flour. If you do try it, let us know in the comments what you used. If you don’t have salted butter, just add a pinch of salt to the butter and sugar at the beginning of the recipe.

Put the 3/4 cup (150g) of sugar and the butter in a medium-size metal bowl. Zest the 2 lemons right into the bowl. Use a flexible silicone spatula or a spoon to break up and mash in the butter so it’s evenly dispersed in the sugar and there are no large visible pieces of butter; it’ll look like damp sand. Make a caramel as above. Add coffee (made to drinking strength) instead of cold water. Cook and add whiskey. Myrtle's advice for making Carrageen for a Dinner Party: In staying in Ballymaloe so long, my priority was never to try to change things or to alter them, it was to try to distil the very best of it, to hold on to it, and then around the edge I can add in the new things and try the new dishes. Classic recipes are at the core of Ballymaloe Desserts. Some — such as Almond Meringue Gâteau with Chocolate and Rum Cream, Summer Pudding and Orange Mousse with Chocolate Wafers — have been used at Ballymaloe House since the 1960s, when Myrtle converted her home into what would become a Michelin-starred restaurant.Remove from the oven and let cool at least 5 to 10 minutes before serving. It’s very hot right out of the oven, so let it sit a little before digging in.

Its specifications were fairly straightforward. It would have “a top shelf where desserts could be displayed and served from and a lower shelf to hold the serving plates, utensils and cutlery,” explains the restaurant's current pastry chef, JR Ryall in his new book, Ballymaloe Desserts, Iconic Recipes and Stories from Ireland. Creamed butter pastries are often used for sweeter pies, such as fruit pies, where the sweetness and tenderness complement the filling. A cold-butter pie crust relies on water content in cold butter evaporating to make the crust rise. The key is to keep the butter as cold as possible to create distinct buttery layers in the crust when baked. A scientific career might have come calling following graduation, but on his final day in the kitchens before his last year at uni, Myrtle offered JR a different career choice. She would like to employ him as the full-time head pastry chef. The dessert trolley at Ballymaloe House. Photo by Cliodhna Prendergast The dessert trolley that helped define Ballymaloe DessertsLike many young chefs, Ryall has staged (an unpaid internship) in some of the world’s top restaurants, taking a two-month break each year to travel, while Anne Healy and the team of pastry chefs in the kitchen take over in his absence. Spending time in Bangkok, South America, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Mexico, it seems almost surprising that none of these influences have crept into the dishes on the dessert trolley. Instead, discovering dishes that have a true sense of place in other countries has reinforced the importance in his mind of preserving the integrity of the classic dishes he cooks in the restaurant. In our new book, the brilliant dessert chef JR Ryall describes how a blood orange dish adds a ray of sunshine; a fruit fool always goes down well and a redcurrant barquette pretties it up too