Fistfuls of raisins, concrete slabs or pools of custard – what makes a just dessert?

I’m always grateful for a little more time at the dinner table. Dirty plates out of sight, it’s time to tuck into an espresso and something sweet. It’s the natural end to any meal, a neat wrap-up that means we leave the table with a gentle hum of happiness.

Dessert, to me, isn’t always meant to impress, either; it’s sometimes meant to take you somewhere. To your grandma’s kitchen table, maybe. Or a time you spent abroad. Even the school canteen, perhaps. While the destination may differ, the expectation remains the same: a dessert must feel familiar, yet somehow improved.

Our favourite desserts expose the sensations that matter the most to us. So I probed my Test Kitchen team for their pudding preferences, and all hell broke loose. Most of the team were committed to one style of pudding (though some demanded two choices), but four genres in particular were prized above all others: creamy, boozy, fresh and fruity.

Those who voted creamy generally revel in anything custard-based and mainline nostalgia: creme caramel or custard tart (be that Portuguese, French or even Asian-inspired), say. Development chef Jake Norman’s heart belongs, in particular, to his mum’s bread-and-butter pudding, which features triangles of generously buttered white bread arranged in a parquet pattern, scattered with fistfuls of raisins, blanketed in custard and brown sugar, then baked until it resembles rolling dunes. Serve with lashings of ice-cream, of course.

Personally, however, I’m team creamy. When I was growing up, my mother often made zabaione, an Italian custard using egg yolks, sugar and sweet wine (marsala, please!). She’d serve it in a large bowl, usually with grated milk chocolate on top, but sometimes with tinned peaches. It really is the simplest of desserts, and I must have made thousands of the things during my time as a pastry chef in the 1990s. It’s a dish very much of that era, true, but, like all great things, it’s also timeless.

Boozy desserts, meanwhile, generally mean one thing for the OTK: tiramisu. It’s kitchen head Milli Taylor’s special weakness. She often plays around with the traditional classic, though, folding melted white chocolate into the mascarpone, for example, or dusting the top with matcha instead of cocoa. And it doesn’t always have to be marsala; sometimes she’ll use dark rum, at others Cointreau. It doesn’t even need to include cheese or cream – Meera Sodha’s vegan version (pictured top) is a clever twist on the old classic, as are Nigel Slater’s raspberry-topped boozy, fruity, creamy treat and Thomasina Miers’ cheerfully inauthentic cherry and chocolate number.

Fresh and fruity, on the other hand, tend to overlap. Many of those in this camp crave the chilled, cleansing effect of fruit salads, sorbets or citrussy pavlova. Our baking queen Verena Lochmuller plumped for lemon meringue pie as a rebellion against stodgy winter puddings, not least because it’s familiar and refreshing; you don’t even have to turn on the oven, either, as proved by Ravneet Gill’s smart no-bake version (above). And, despite her present-day preferences, Verena couldn’t help but fondly recall a favourite from her school days, too: chocolate cornflake cakes, squared off and paired with warm strawberry custard, and known to some as “concrete slabs”.

Strangely, chocolate lovers are a rarity in the OTK. Even with such an alphabet of pairing possibilities available – from almond to anise, banana to bacon, cardamom to cauliflower – it turns out the crew just aren’t big choc fans. Or maybe it’s more that a tahini and halva brownie is better suited to be an afternoon treat than a grand finale?

There’s also a widespread soft spot for British puddings in our kitchen. While the word “pudding” may morph once it gets across the Atlantic, for Brits it tends to denote a warm, jammy or raisin-studded dessert cradled in a pool of custard, cream or semi-melted ice-cream. Katja Tausig’s childhood desserts, for example, were unexpectedly British: strawberries and cream, iced buns, jam tarts (Dan Lepard’s are especially tempting). Similarly, while Angelos Angelides grew up surrounded by Cypriot bundt cakes, he now favours stodgy, British puds; in fact, just about anything that’s usually served with custard earns his vote.

So, even at a time when dessert trends are changing, the most fashionable right now may just also be the most old-fashioned. In puddings we seek familiarity, but what is familiar to one person will not necessarily be the same to someone else. Everyone has that one dessert that brings them a hum of happiness as they leave the dinner table – and, for me, that’s got to be zabaione.

Dress to impress | Amy Poon came to the test kitchen to give us a masterclass in wontons, steamed fish and shredded potato stir-fry. Her chilli vinegar dressing is the stuff of dreams, and everyone was fighting over the bottle she brought with her.

Be a brick | My friend Caz Hildebrand, who designs many of my cookbooks, is showing her most recent wonderful artworks, created with bricks she’s found on a Liverpool beach, as part of a seven-women exhibition at Hypha Studios in Stratford, east London, dealing with questions of community and longevity.

What I’m cooking next | Last week, a colleague told me about the tornado omelette, a swirl of eggs cooked in a sinful amount of butter until they’re just about set. Apparently, it’s all over the internet, too. I now know what my future Sunday mornings will look like, and I can see the kids’ faces already.

Another fine mess | I got my two boys to make little lemon meringue tarts with me, which is always a risk. This time, though, I was pretty confident that I had everything under control: the flaky pastry cases were already baked, the lemon curd was made and the meringue whipped. Then we got piping … I’m always amazed how much mess can be made in the shortest time by the smallest number of people, even with the absolute best intentions. Work surfaces, floor, hob, faces, arms – everything was evenly covered with a wonderful marbling of white and yellow. The joy …