The easiest, but incorrect, way to describe Bara Brith is as a Welsh version of Dundee Cake. But it is a lot, lot less rich and fruity than its Scottish counterpart, and is not really a cake as such, but bread.

Strikingly different in style to Maurice Steger's sequinned brilliance, recorder virtuoso Pamela Thorby's soft, sweet, natural tone is ideally suited to the whimsical delicacies of d'Hervelois, Philidor and Dieupart.

Poètes du Piano is the perfect description for this beautifully sequenced selection of Romantic piano pieces, a series of exquisite miniatures by the likes of Chopin, Ravel, Fauré and Poulenc, in which delicacy and brevity are prized over the more prosaic charms of full-scale works.

Once upon a time it was enough that restaurants served up mouth-watering delicacies. But as the number of restaurants grows, establishments are seeking ever more unusual ways to draw in the punters and differentiate themselves from the competition.

The other day a four-and-a-half-inch high plastic lemon appeared in our fridge. I asked my wife what it was doing there. "Oh that," she replied. "Lucy thought it would be useful for storing the lemon halves you don't use." Lucy has a habit of supplying us with solutions to problems that we did not know we had.

A taste from each of Caprice-owner Richard Caring's poshest restaurants – the chocolate cake from Annabel's or grissini and polpetta from Harry's Bar – will be on sale to the public when he opens his new Mount Street Deli on Wednesday.

In a country where so many people go hungry, it is a dark irony that up to 30 per cent of the fruit and vegetables grown in India goes bad before reaching the market thanks to a combination of bad roads and a lack of refrigerated trucks.

Ludovico Einaudi occupies the often disparaged space that used to be the preserve of new-age music, situated midway between classical music's studied restraint and pop's eager melodicism.

The Labèque sisters here offer a blend of Satie's work for both two and four hands, with the solo pieces divvied up according to compatability.

The likeable English songwriter does what all English songwriters are obliged to do one day: an album of favourite American songs.

Catullus was early Rome’s most revered and reviled poet. From the first page of this intriguing new novel about his love affair with the woman whose identity he encoded as “Lesbia”, Helen Dunmore captures vividly both the poet’s tone and the heightened, overheated world of Julius Caesar’s Rome.

Depending on your point of view, offal is either a heavenly delicacy which no serious diner could spot on the menu and forgo, or it constitutes the suspicious smelling parts of an animal that no sane eater would willingly thrusting between his or her lips.

Considering that an accurate performance of its intricate interactions seemed barely possible when Stockhausen completed it in 1957, Gruppen for three orchestras (1955-7) has done rather well here, periodically drawing rather large audiences.