It’s time to bring a little sweetness to your lives. While they may look a little fancy in appearance, these are recipes that use some clever shortcuts that make you out to be the hero. Strawberries and cream are a pairing as old as time. In Ireland, we produce world class dairy, so our cream is primed to perfection.
As mid-June rolls in, our strawberries are also reaching their peak. Fruit is all about the right balance of heat, sunlight and water when it is growing, and all about science when it comes to picking. When the fruit achieves the perfect balance of natural sugar versus acid, it is ready for eating. Pick too early and the acid will be too high, the flesh too firm and the colour under developed. Pick too late and the sugars will have taken over, the texture will be soft and jammy and the colour will be heading towards brown. We are fortunate to have some fantastic fruit growers in this country and strawberries in particular are one of summer’s great joys.
The first recipe is an upmarket take on the classic strawberries and cream. I’ve upgraded the cream to make a custard, flavoured with vanilla seeds and sweetened with icing sugar for a wonderfully smooth texture. Custard can be temperamental at the best of times, cook it too far in a pot and you have sweet scrambled eggs. Cook it in a tart case and the case can leak, leaving crispy egg all over your oven.
To avoid any drama, I bake the custard at a controlled temperature in ovenproof bowls. By surrounding the bowls with some boiling water from the kettle and covering in cling film, the custard will set quickly and remain nice and smooth. All that’s left to do is chill them in the fridge and garnish when you’re ready to serve.
These are perfect puddings for a crowd. I’ve garnished them with a simple strawberry coulis, some sliced strawberries and some shop-bought meringue for some crunch. The addition of fennel or dill isn’t just for show, their aniseed flavour is lovely with the sweet strawberries.
The second recipe involves mille feuille, which translates from French as a thousand sheets, referring to the thin, crisp layers of the sweet puff pastry. Now, it would take two extra pages here and a wealth of time to give you a home-made puff pastry recipe that has the layers required, so I won’t. I always have a block of shop-bought puff pastry in the freezer. By following a specific cooking technique from the restaurant kitchen, you can achieve a very decent result. After that, it’s just a case of whipping some nice cream, sourcing some decent raspberries and assembling.
