Thomasina Miers has spent most of her career arguing that Mexican cooking is misunderstood in Britain, and these two recipes are a quiet extension of that argument. Pumpkin — dismissed as a carving prop or a latte flavouring — gets treated here as what it actually is: a sweet, dense, versatile fruit that rewards technique. The fritters and the chocolate slice are not the same dish twice; they're two different demonstrations of what happens when you take the ingredient seriously. The fritters work because of sequencing. Miers grates pumpkin and carrot together, then wrings out the moisture before anything else happens — a step that separates crisp from soggy and that most home cooks skip. The spice base (coriander seed, cumin, cinnamon, ginger, garlic) is bloomed in oil with spring onions before it touches the vegetables, which means the gram flour is binding already-flavoured material rather than compensating for raw spice. The relish — green chilli, coriander, lime, apple cider vinegar, honey — is the kind of sauce that makes you want to dip things that have no business being dipped. The chocolate slice is more interesting structurally than it first appears. Browned butter is the load-bearing move: cooking the butter to the point of toasted milk solids before adding brown sugar means you're building two distinct layers of caramel complexity before the eggs go in. The pumpkin puree contributes moisture and a quiet earthiness that stops the thing from being purely sweet. Cardamom is the right call — its floral, slightly medicinal note cuts through the richness in a way that cinnamon alone wouldn't manage. The dark chocolate chunks melt unevenly during baking, which is the point: you get pockets of intensity rather than uniform chocolate flavour. Both recipes are scaled for crowds, which is honest about their purpose. The fritters make 14 and the slice serves 9; Miers wrote these with 60 teenagers in mind and the quantities reflect that. The prep times are realistic — 15 minutes for the fritters is achievable if you have a box grater and a tea towel ready. The chocolate slice's 1 hour 20 minutes includes the pumpkin roasting time, which is mostly passive. What holds these together is Miers' consistent instinct: she layers flavour at every stage rather than dumping it all in at once. The fritters bloom spices separately, the cake browns butter separately, the relish builds acid and heat in stages. It's a pedagogical move as much as a culinary one — you could cook either recipe and come away understanding something transferable about how flavour builds. That's what distinguishes a recipe that teaches from one that merely instructs.
