How to serve the perfect brunch at home

Come this way, up the garden steps and into a backyard where the patio is shaded by an old avocado tree.

Fill a plate from a buffet of dishes as springlike as they are fresh and take a seat in the morning sun.

Nibble a leek pancake wrapped around a crisp spear of asparagus, sip a herbal tisane, indulge in a chocolate-orange scone.

Let the textures and aromas play over your senses like flowers in a bouquet. Relax and celebrate spring with a leisurely brunch.

Make it a cakewalk

For the table's centrepiece is a stack of leek pancakes designed for wrapping around a roasted asparagus spear.

Gravlax (a Finnish dish of cured salmon), arranged like a fan on a platter, is a perfect match.

Lemon grass, basil and mint steep in a pitcher to make a fragrant tisane for sipping.

Then meander around the garden and come back to the table for a plate of chocolate-orange scones laced with oat flour, leavened with cream and still warm from the oven, or a parfait of Greek yoghurt and strawberries.

Such a leisurely brunch is built not only by the arrangement itself — laid out buffet-style and assembled to suit personal tastes — but also by the fact that much of it can be done ahead of time.

For a Sunday brunch, you'll need to start curing your gravlax on Friday morning. Use skin-on salmon fillets, and add sliced fennel and a sprinkling of aquavit — a refreshment from Scandinavia that is typically flavoured with caraway.

Subtler than smoked salmon, gravlax has a velvety texture and a delicate taste that pairs beautifully with creme fraîche studded with toasted caraway seeds.

The day before the brunch, toast caraway seeds in a pan, crush them and mix with a cup of creme fraîche, salt and pepper. The flavours marry overnight.

The morning of your brunch, prepare fresh herbs to make a tisane.

Fill a clear glass teapot or pitcher with a few stalks of lemon grass and lush sprigs of mint or basil, lemon verbena or thyme.

Next come leek pancakes — simple cakes enlivened with leeks and kamut flour, a high-protein wheat flour that has a nutty flavour.

Sauté the leeks instead of adding melted butter to the batter. The butter cooks the leeks into aromatic threads and picks up their heady flavours.

Cook the pancakes in a cast-iron pan or griddle, making them smaller than usual.

Thin stalks of asparagus in market stalls and produce aisles signal the season.

Break the stalks off at their fibrous ends — they'll snap at the right place — and put them into a hot pan with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkling of sea salt.

Tossed constantly over high heat, they'll roast in a few minutes.

This method brings out the vegetable's flavour, while keeping its lovely crunch.

More to savour

To prepare eggs, whisk them into home-made hollandaise sauce, torqued with minced dill. It's a classic match for the asparagus and tastes great on the pancakes too (see recipe).

With the savoury side done, you'll want to hit the sweet spot. Chocolate-orange scones are the perfect fit.

The recipe is from Alice Medrich, a baker and author from San Francisco, the United States, who has a way with chocolate.

Then, for those who linger over coffee, make individual fruit-and-yoghurt parfaits.

Sprinkle a few tablespoons of sugar and the peel from two lemons over a bowlful of freshly sliced strawberries, stir and let the fruit macerate.

After 15 minutes, when the strawberries have released their crimson juice, spoon a generous amount of Greek yoghurt into pretty glasses.

Add strawberries and layer the fruit and yoghurt about three quarters of the way up each glass. Toss in a mint leaf and you're done.