Today I am taking a little detour from my usual rubbish to do nothing more than write about toad in the hole. Why - because today I set out to make the greatest toad in the hole in history and I believe I may have succeeded.

Sometimes, everything comes off just right and I thought, just in case anybody else wants to have a go, I'd give a real, in depth description of how I did it.

If you are reading this and are not British, you have probably never heard of this unusually named dish. It is really nothing more than sausages baked in batter - Yorkshire pudding batter - but every time I've had this it hasn't lived up to the promise. Usually the batter doesn't rise well and is a bit soggy and crap. I had a plan today to make one that was really fluffy and light and made a good deal of effort to record exactly what I did so if my plan worked I could share it with anyone who wanted to do it themselves.

Hopefully the photo will have convinced you that this was a pretty good toad in the hole and hopefully this great British classic will spread around the globe.

So what did I do?

First: Buy some really good sausages. High meat content, big and plump. I used some outdoor reared pork sausages. Cumberlands would be good, lamb might be excellent, especially considering toad in the hole was historically made with lamb chops.

Make the batter a few hours ahead. The batter recipe is simple:

• 1 cup (150g) self raising flour
• 200 ml semi skimmed milk
• 3 large eggs (really fresh)
• 1/2 tsp Salt

Put all these in a jug and give them a really good whisk to make a fairly runny batter. Put this in the fridge.

About 1½ hours before you want to eat turn the oven on to 190c. You need to let the oven get hot and stay hot so that when you open the door it doesn't cool. Put a ceramic dish (a lasagne dish is what I used) in the oven, this wants to get hot too. A thin metal tin won't work as it will lose too much heat when you put the batter in, ceramic is thick and holds the heat.

When the oven and dish are really heated up, put a little sunflower oil in the dish and add the sausages. Cook them in the oven for about 10 mins to brown a little. Add about 2 TBSP more oil to the dish and put it back in the oven to heat the oil.

When it's hot, pour over the batter, put it back in the oven and don't touch it for 1/2 an hour. Under no circumstances open the oven door during this time. After 1/2 an hour, turn it around - very quickly, you don't want to lose heat from the oven - to make sure it cooks evenly and keep cooking it until it's good and crispy on top and around the edges. (About 15 mins more).

You need some gravy with this - I had some in the fridge from an earlier dinner (luckily). I also had some pork skin which I made into crackling. Recipe another day - today it's all about the toad.

For dessert we had a little known Corsican dish; Bonjimboule (pron bon-dzam-bool), cooked for me once by a very odd mathematician from the small town of Bastelicaccia - recipe below - I cheated with the custard a bit but pepped it up with vanilla and cream.