We couldn’t let Valentine’s Day coincide with pasta day without creating something a bit special for our favourite person. My long-suffering better half, little Al’s lovely Ma, is the genius cake-extraordinaire behind Forty-Two Cakes. So as a little tribute to her, we’ve taken cake flavours and turned them into pasta!

One of little Al’s favourite things is our weekend trip to the markets. We’ve got a routine now, that starts with a snack and a coffee – decaf macchiato for him, double espresso for me, followed by the butcher, deli, and wholefood shop, before finishing with the fruit and veggies at the grocer. Little Al talks about it all week and tells anyone who’ll listen.

Pretty much the only thing better than a plate of stuffed and pan-fried gnocchi, is a plate of bright purple stuffed and pan-fried gnocchi. This week we’ve made a light dough out of roasted purple potatoes, and filled it with creamy eggplant. Tossed through the sage-infused oil that we finished them in, they have a comfortingly subtle flavour, but with a bold hit of colour!

This week we’re throwing back to the 80s! This spinach and ricotta rotolo was something that my Mum used to cook up for special occasions, back when béchamel was big. Or so I’m told. I was more a concept than a thing at the time, and I’m not sure that béchamel ever actually went out of fashion anyway, so take that as you will.

Sometimes we cook up the classics, other times we think: what would you get if you made sea anemones out of pasta, plated them into a rockpool, and made that rockpool out of margaritas? This week’s pasta is lime and tequila prawn sacchettoni, made with blue spirulina dough, and served in citrus salt enclosed pools of juniper-olive oil, dehydrated blood orange and lime, pippies, and fresh seaweed.

This week we’ve got a quick little filled pasta for you. With a simple egg dough and a spreadable roasted pistachio filling, you can stamp these little anolini out in less time than it takes your cafetière to boil. A pasta like this can be paired with just about anything, but we dropped them into some bone broth stock that we had hanging around in the freezer, for a meal of subtle but complex flavour.

This week we mixed a little nostalgia into our pasta: figs, anisette, and the lolly bowl. One of the most enduring memories that I have of my Nonna’s house is actually my Nonno’s liqueur cabinet, filled with mysterious and intricate glassware, and the intoxicating smell of anisette. Always competing for my fickle loyalty was my great aunty, who would keep a box of those rectangular Italian lollies at the ready to bribe us with. And my mum loves figs!

This week we wanted to bring you a filled pasta dish that you can knock up in less than an hour; something packed with fresh flavour, and accompanied by a sauce that you can make without a single pot or pan. These simple pansotti, filled with rainbow chard, radicchio, mustard greens, marjoram, and ricotta are what we came up with. They’re served with a delicious walnut sauce that’s made entirely with a stick blender!