One of the consequences of moving house last week is that I’ve had to say goodbye to my Rangemaster induction cooker.

While its new owner gets to grip with cast iron saucepans, I’ve returned to cooking on a standard Belling ceramic halogen hob with a rather fierce electric fan oven. Although it seems to be handling fish fingers and chips fairly well, I’ve been putting off the moment of baking anything less straightforward for fear that everything would crumble under the intensity of the fan.

Yeterday however, my children returned home with the intention to bake spotty cookies for their school cake sale today to raise money for Children in Need. I ventured into the garden shed with a torch to find the baking trays and wire cooling racks we needed. With the torch batteries failing, I dug down through the piles and piles of boxes. Naturally, I’d packed the baking trays at the very bottom of a very large box full of cake pans and mixing bowls, and I still have no clue at all about where I stored the wire cooling racks. Now completely in the dark, I eventually gave up the search and pulled out instead a couple of pizza trays with circular holes in the base – not quite as aerated as a cooling rack, but I thought I could turn them upside down and perhaps the cookies wouldn’t end up too soggy-bottomed if they cooled there rather than on their hot trays.

And so at 7pm yesterday evening we set about baking our first batch of cookies in our new oven in our new house.

We used our go-to cookie dough recipe, then pressed some pink Smarties (the ones that support the National Breast Cancer Campaign) into the top of each cookie before they cooled and set to make them ‘spotty’ (“Show your spots, let’s raise lots“).

It turned out that I needn’t have worried at all about baking in my new oven. I reduced the temperature by 10 degrees C and the cookies baked evenly and completely as expected. Perhaps I’ll try baking a cake again sometime soon …