With great power comes great responsibility

About a year before he died, my dad – the king of the fad and the fixation, the passion and the preoccupation – decided he would learn to cook. He was roughly 60, giddy with the liberty of early retirement and hungry for the new – or perhaps just hungry. Prior to this resolution, he was like many men of his generation – my mum could not leave the homestead for a few days without a significant investment in Vesta meals and malt loaf to ensure he would actually eat something while she was away.

And so it began. He bought knives and cookery books. He rolled up his sleeves. And for a few months, he rarely arrived at my house without some homemade offering – a batch of oatcakes, a bowl of exotic fruit salad with anxiously simmered syrup, selotaped shut to prevent a slow, sticky seep all the way from Norfolk to South London. That's how I remember it, at least. Maybe this only happened once or twice, but they're my memories and I'll misshape them how I like.

One of the last presents I bought him – and I don't remember if it was the last Christmas or the last birthday – was a kitchen blowtorch. It was the perfect marriage of man and miniature machine – flash, nifty, yet with a considerable capacity for foolhardy calamity. In my childhood, my dad memorably a) fell backwards through the glass of our living room window while trying to secure a rope on his hand-built boat which lived on our driveway, and b) almost perished under the weight of our car when he was working underneath it and the puny power of a sub-standard jack was dramatically exposed.

After he died – and incredibly, in the run-up to this event, he had managed not to set fire to his own eyebrows – my mum gave the blowtorch to me and I buried it deep in one of my kitchen cupboards, where it has been in the intervening four and a half years.

Until today. Today, with an appropriateness that is as pleasing as it is coincidental, the culinary blowtorch was resurrected. I made a Simnel Cake, according to the gospel of Nigella Lawson, to take to Miss W and Marbury's for Easter lunch. I handrolled the 11 tiny marzipan balls that go on top – as you will know, they traditionally represent the apostles (soz, Judas – you're barred). Mine are of slightly uneven size and randomly spaced which, of course, is of considerable, if indeterminate, religious significance.

'Now for the bit I love,' says Nigella, introducing the notion of artfully scorching the marzipan topping, 'but you can ignore altogether.'

What are you saying, Lawson? That I am not up to a bit of live-action charring? Who do you think you're dealing with? I have won over £3.75 in high-level baking competitions. Step back, cow eyes*, while I open the throttle and hit the ignition.

(You may guess from this that I am not a driver.)

Just so you know, blowtorching is AMAZING. I have rarely felt more alive. I may have found my inner superhero. She has a blowtorch coming out of the end of each limb and she is called The Caramelizer.

All back to my place for crème brûlée?

*I don't mean this. I love Nigella. I'm just showing off.