How easy is it to make some of London's best-loved dishes?

Bread Ahead doughnuts are one of the best things about London. If you are near the Borough Market stall that sells them it’s worth a detour for a plump cushion of light dough with vanilla cream custard inside. Have a tissue to hand — eating one of these is a messy undertaking.

But sometimes the stall runs out, or it’s closed. So it’s welcome news that now you can make them yourself. The bakery has let its secret out with a book of recipes that founders Justin and Louise Gellatly and Matt Jones say they spent ages perfecting.

It joins volumes from Trullo (handy because it’s near-impossible to get a table at this Italian restaurant or its sister, Padella) and The London Cookbook, which has recipes for the capital’s cult dishes, from elaborate curries such as those at Gymkhana in Mayfair to cheese on toast à la St John.

But how easy is it to reproduce the efforts of the experts? We put their recipes to the test.

Padella’s pici cacio e pepe

Cost at restaurant: £6.50
Cost to make: £1.43
Time to make: 15 minutes to make dough, 30 minutes for it to rest, 30 minutes to cook and make sauce

I’m caked in flour and bent over the kitchen counter meticulously rolling dough into finger-sized worms. Apparently I’m making an award-winning pasta dish but it feels more like I’ve gone back to playschool. I’m attempting to make pici cacio e pepe, a classic Tuscan recipe from Borough Market’s Padella. The homemade pasta was voted Best Dish at last year’s London Restaurant Festival Awards.

It’s simple, they say, but I’m feeling the heat. Chefs Tim Siadatan and Jordan Frieda have been professional cooks since school and make regular trips to Italy. I went to Venice when I was 13 and occasionally boil tagliatelle for my long-suffering housemates. I’ve certainly never made pasta from scratch before. It’s science, they say.

I quit chemistry at GCSE.

Pici is a bit like thick spaghetti, except it’s made from a denser dough and doesn’t contain egg. It’s very labour-intensive (argh!) and, as a result, it’s not common in London restaurants. The recipe tells me the “worms” should weigh 15g so I check mine against the scales and the dial rises to 27g. Oops. I’ve already made 15 of a similar size. I set about cutting my worms in half and they end up looking more like sausages but at least I’m sticking to the book. Once the dough is done it’s simple — boil then add butter, black pepper and lemon juice.

The final stage tells me to add cooked pasta to a buttery mixture and pop grated parmesan on top. It melts together and suddenly I have what looks like a servable dish. The result tastes like macaroni cheese and I’m pleasantly surprised, though my wiggly worms are still far too big and doughy. Perhaps, faced with this effort, my dinner guests would rather brave the Padella queue.

Katie Strick

Bread Ahead vanilla custard doughnuts

Cost at stall: £2.50 each
Cost to make: 45p each
Time to make: 15 minutes to make dough, a day for it to rise, 30 minutes to fry, make custard and fill.

The first challenge was finding time to make the dough on an evening when I had time to fry the next day. These doughnuts are impossible to make in a working week when you have a smattering of evening plans and want some room for spontaneity.

When I was finally ready and had stopped being intimidated by the elaborate two-page recipe, making the dough was easy — maybe I’m actually a baking natural, I thought confidentially.

Then came the frying. Here’s where it gets messy and you start to see why the doughnuts cost so much — they are hard work. I separated the huge master orb of dough into smaller balls — only they didn’t stay small for long, rising like alien creatures to a size I doubted would fit in my pan.

This meant they took twice the time to fry but the process was entertainingly dramatic, as they hissed in the oil and puffed up to look not unlike the professional ones.

I filled half with homemade custard and half with raspberry jam (shop bought because making it would be

a step too far towards a Fifties housewife). Filling was clumsy with just a piping bag and I needed helpers to hold the doughnuts while

I squeezed in the liquid.

My creations were better than expected — you can’t go wrong with warm dough coated in sugar — and I enjoyed surprising friends with them as I am not known for my baking. But next time I have a doughnut craving I will go to the stall — surely the joy of living in London is not having to rely on your own culinary skills?

Susannah Butter

Gymkhana’s potato chaat

Time to make: 30 minutes
Cost at restaurant: £10
Cost to make: £6.77 per head

This was my vegetarian Everest. It’s actually a relatively simple dish from one of Karam Sethi’s London institutions (JKS Restaurants’ other venues include Hoppers and Trishna). As a delectable heap of fried new potatoes, chickpeas, chaat masala and rose raita (a mix of Greek yoghurt, mint, rose petals, green chilies and ginger) this potentially mouth-watering dish is sympathetic to those with an inferior flair for presentation (me!).

Once you’ve got the ingredients it’s easy enough to throw together: simply boil potatoes while whipping up the rose raita. I’m sure there’s an art to this — mine didn’t look nearly as irresistible as the one in the recipe book — but it’s essentially a case of finely chopping herbs, mint and chilies, getting the masala mix right and then drawing it all together. My mates enjoyed it and no one died of food poisoning. Success.

The ingredients, however, are fiendishly hard to track down. Where do you get dried rose petals on a Sunday afternoon? I spent an hour searching in Bethnal Green — usually a peerless hub for sourcing ambitious ingredients, with Asian food stores aplenty — and tracked down tamarind chutney, chaat masala and amchoor powder from a Bangladeshi grocer, but even Columbia Road Flower Market failed to deliver on the petals. I also spent about £27.08 overall on a meal that serves four. However, I’m now the proud owner of a tonne of curry ingedients and yogurt, and hope economies of scale will kick in. Dinner at mine, anyone?

Samuel Fishwick

St John’s Welsh rarebit

Time to make: 30 minutes
Cost at restaurant: £6
Cost to make: £2.50 each

When we were divvying up the recipes in the office the Welsh rarebit was offered, generously, to me — I normally pale at the prospect of cooking anything. No matter how idiot-proof the recipe I am hapless in the kitchen — and not even comically so. It was assumed, though, that even I could manage to prepare a glorified cheese toastie.

It’s touch and go for a bit: my first attempt at melting the butter and the flour together created a thick, greying wallpaper paste. For take two I got a grip and managed to create the vaunted “biscuity” mixture from the recipe and then hit a bit of a roll adding the various other ingredients to create a viscous, gooey cheese mixture. I spread it generously on thick rectangles of toast and grill each sandwich, only burning one of the four, which I give to my housemate, with the unburned side face up to conceal my failings.

Doing it yourself is definitely worth it, for cost alone. And once I’ve had a few more shots at it, it might just be as good as the real thing.

Phoebe Luckhurst

Trullo is published by Square Peg, price £17; Baking School, The Bread Ahead Cookbook is out on August 31 (£23, Fig Tree); The London Cookbook is published by Sphere, price £11