Preparation time: 10 minutes, serves 6, no cooking required
Ingredients:
500g strawberries and/or raspberries
150ml cream
200g Philadelphia cheese
3 tablespoons caster sugar
1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla essence
6 tablespoons peach schnapps (or apple juice)
6 individual meringue nests
Method:
Wash and slice the berries and divide between six bowls, keeping a few whole berries for decoration.
Put one teaspoon of schnapps into each dish. Whip the cream until it just holds its shape, then mix with
Philadelphia, sugar and vanilla.
Break the meringue nests into smallish chunks and fold into the mix.
Spoon into dishes. Drizzle each desert with the remaining schnapps,
and decorate with the remaining berries.
In the fruit garden
Raspberries
Your raspberries should really do well with the dry weather we have had. However, there is probably an abundance of young cane appearing now too. Some of this will need removing, so take out the weaker ones to leave about eight new canes per metre of row.
If you have had trouble with birds eating your fruit in the past, now is the time to get some netting ready.
Strawberries
Again, with the good spring and summer, strawberries should also be doing well. There should not be any fruit rots, and slugs should be scarce.
Apples and Plums
If you are lucky you should see plenty of fruit, and now is the time to do your thinning. If you leave too many fruits on the tree, none will taste well, so remove the smaller ones by hand, leaving one plum on every two inches (5cm) of branch, and one apple per four to six inches (10-15cm) of branch.
Due to the dry humid weather, mildew has been common on apple. You can identify this as a white powdery substance on some shoots and leaves. This can be tackled with a chemical such as sulphur if you use an organic approach. Alternatively, you could prune off infected shoots, which we find effective at this time of year.
