It's Thursday night at my in-laws'. There're eight of us around the table — my wife's parents, her sister and the boyfriend, her brother and fiancé, our kids doing what kids do at the end of a meal. Dessert is sorted: mango ice cream, made that morning, sitting in the freezer. Add in the coconut crumble and it's enough. More than enough.

I make a gastrique anyway.

A gastrique is a sauce. Cook sugar to a light caramel, hit with vinegar, add in a fruit and reduce until it parts like the red sea. For a Thursday night. For family, who would have been surprised with and delighted by the ice cream alone.

The sugar seizes when the vinegar hits it. Looks completely wrong — a grainy, clumped, burnt-looking disaster that any reasonable person would pour down the sink. Ten seconds later it's dissolved again, and when the passion fruit goes in the smell that wafts from the pan is magical. Tropical and sharp and sweet all at once. I spoon a quenelle of cold ice cream into a puddle of hot sauce and bring the bowls out.

For a moment, nobody says anything.

Then the first mouthful goes down, and the praise starts.

I stand there awkwardly receiving it and bashfully nodding like I'm supposed to, and yet in the back of my mind, behind the facade of humility, is a quieter and less flattering thing: yes. That's what I'm after.

But as I stand there, bowls empty, people saying generous things, something in me contracts. I deflect. I find a flaw in the sauce to mention. I say something about how the ice cream was the easy part. I do everything except look at the work plainly and say: yes, I made that, and it is good. It's a kind of false humility that keeps my ego revolving on itself — seeking the praise, flinching when it arrives, still always about me.

Australia has a bring-a-plate culture: when you're invited for a meal, you bring something. And so even when told not to, I've hosted lunch — hours of preparation, a menu that beats the pants off any restaurant for a hundred kilometres in any direction — where the guests arrived with an opened bag of salad mix and a few chopped capsicums. I've watched Woolworths brand vanilla get spooned onto a blueberry pie containing $45 worth of berries I'd spent half the day making. And the thought that shot through me in that half-second, before I arranged my face, was not menu anxiety.

It was How dare you dilute my creations with your averageness.

I read dense Russian novels for reasons that aren't entirely about the literature. I throw kettlebells around for reasons that aren't entirely about my health. I competed in sport not necessarily to win but to do something so well that people noticed. And I stood in my father-in-law's kitchen on a Thursday night making a sauce that nobody asked for, that took twenty-five minutes, that the ice cream didn't need — and felt, when the silence broke and the praise came in, awkward about receiving what I'd been hoping to receive.

I love to feed people, love to watch someone eat something good, love the table full of people who didn't expect to be this well looked after. And I also love to be the reason for it. There's a deeply rooted part of me that wants to do impressive things in order to be thought of as impressive.

CS Lewis described real humility as a man who designs the best cathedral in the world, knows it to be the best, and rejoices in it no more and no less than if someone else had built it. The pleasure belongs to the cathedral, not to the architect.

The ego still stirs. It always will. But love and pride fuelling the same engine isn't something I want to root out. The gastrique exists because of both, and it's real, and my mother-in-law is still talking about it. The goal isn't to stop making the gastrique. It's to make it as well as I can, know that it's good, and not hang my hat on being the reason why.

Next Thursday it'll be pumpkin pie. Thursday morning the kids will drag their chairs to the bench and stand beside me, small hands squeezing big chunks of butter into flour.

Thursday evening I'll bring it out.

I'll tell everyone "the boys made the pastry."

I don't know if that's genuine, or just a more sophisticated kind of performance.