SUMMER DESSERTS

BY KATIE CAMPBELL

The high king of dessert is ice cream: truly, all other desserts are just vehicles to get ice cream on your plate, and that’s a beautiful thing. Over the years, the supermarkets have begun stocking more and more in the way of ice creams: you can splurge on a tub of Ben and Jerry’s or Häagen-Dazs if you’re in the market for something luxurious, absolutely, but offerings for people whose diets are dairy-free or those who opt for reduced sugar options are now much easier to come by in supermarkets, with the aforementioned luxury brands even offering their own dairy-free options! If you’re up to the challenge - and seriously, it is a bit of a challenge - you could even try making your own ice cream this summer. Ice cream makers do take a significant portion of the work out of the proceedings, and are available for less than £20 if you do decide to take it up as a new hobby, but they’re not entirely necessary to create lush ice cream. Melissa Clark’s recipe in the New York Times, aptly called The Only Ice Cream Recipe You’ll Ever Need, is a phenomenal base for making just about any flavour of ice cream you can dream up, but it does require a little bit of cooking know-how to get the custard base right. If that sounds a bit much, BBC Good Food’s No-Churn Vanilla Ice Cream recipe takes five minutes to cobble together with a couple of low-cost, easy to find ingredients, and produces the most luxurious condensed milk ice cream after a few hours of freezing. If you want to keep things dairy-free, Olive Magazine has brilliant recipes for super easy sorbet in any flavour you could possibly imagine - including whisky sour sorbet for the discerning adults amongst us!

Meringues don’t get the hype that they deserve. Inexpensive to buy, unbelievably easy to make and the basis of many a classic British dessert, they’re the foundation of many a good “chuck it in a bowl and see if it turns out ok” evening treat for many of us with a sweet tooth. Throw together meringues, berries and whipped cream and you have yourself an Eton mess. In fact, throwing almost any fruit and a little cream on top makes for an absolutely indulgent dessert that’s relatively inexpensive to make. Little meringue kisses can be purchased from supermarkets (where you can even get flavoured ones) that make for perfect decoration or the finishing touches for cakes and sundaes. If you’re confident - which you should be - you can try making your own meringues. It’s just egg whites and granulated sugar mixed together. That’s it. If you have eggs about to go out of date and can’t face the thought of an omelette, this is a nice way to use them up! Whisk up the egg whites and sugar until they reach stiff peaks, then you can either pipe them onto a lined baking tray or spoon them on, before baking until they’re firm. Now that you have the secret to making meringues, you’re unstoppable.

Baking is fun, relaxing, and at the end of it all, you have cake. That’s reason enough for most to get in the kitchen and get the apron on, honestly. Fruity or citrusy cakes are great ways of using up leftover fruit, as the great Banana Bread Baking Craze of 2020 rightly taught us. Raspberry ripple cakes or blueberry muffins are sure to go down well, and make for a lovely treat of a warm summer evening. There are loads of recipes out there which will cater to the specific fruits or citrus you have on hand, but don’t be afraid to get experimental: lime drizzle cakes are amazing, and work in exactly the same way as lemon drizzle cakes. Can you make an orange drizzle cake? We have never tried, but you might! A good bit of advice before you bring the Great British Bake Off into your own home: freezing your fruit then covering it in a very light layer of flour before putting it in your mixture usually helps prevent it from sinking to the bottom when it goes in the oven. Now: on your marks, get set, bake!