In the lab

In the Writers' Rooms series at the Guardian, Heston Blumenthal's development kitchen:

People imagine I wake up in the morning saying something like "I'm going to make an ice-cream that walks", but 80% of the time I'm doing 40 versions of the same ice-cream recipe with different amounts of egg yolk. We're currently working on a new dish called the Mock Turtle Soup Mad Hatter's Tea. There are lots of Alice references and it comes together when the diner dips the most upmarket, gold-leafed, fob-watch-shaped stock cube into a bowl of broth to produce a gold-flecked consommé. However, to serve 250 of these a week will require a heavy-duty freeze drier that costs £40,000. You have to think about it. And the pie on the table? It's for a TV series on feasts, which will be shown next year. It looks traditional enough, but you should know that the inspiration came from the nursery rhyme with four and twenty blackbirds ...