Baked apricots with maple & fenugreek

The angular, toffee-coloured seeds of fenugreek are usually employed in savoury cooking, adding an earthiness to Indian and Ethiopian foods in particular, yet they also have a brown sugar quality, which leads them to play a key role in mock maple syrups. The secret is to toast the seeds, which pares back the bitterness and brings the nutty sweetness to the fore.

In the Arab world, fenugreek seeds stud a syrupy, yeasted cake called helbeh, and in India sweet balls of laddu can be mad