Pink gooseberries, cream and sugar

Gooseberries are usually green, but the ones for sale on Sunday were bright cerise with green patches. However sweet they may appear, inside each one is a sour heart. Lots of sugar is needed to mellow this ill - temper and turn them into something luscious; sweet with an edgy tang. I am familiar with them mostly as a crumble, with a topping of loose, sugary pastry, but I have also eaten jams made from the berries and a popular dessert yogurt in the UK, the Muller fruit corner, where the yogurt is separate from it's little sidekick of sweetened fruit. The gooseberry flavour was always my favourite but now no longer available.

 

We decided that there simply weren't enough berries for a crumble and made a compote instead to be used with whipped cream and sugar to create a kind of gooseberry fool. Amazingly a little research on a 'fool', (just in case I'm leading you down the garden path), revealed that gooseberry is indeed the original and still best loved fruit for this dessert invention. 

I eyeballed how much sugar to use, literally pouring it in until it looked about right. I had tasted one of the berries just before and it was suffering from an extreme case of sour - puss, so I figured it would need a decent amount. A little splash of water and the mixture simmered down to a dusky pink slush. Easy, refreshing and sweet with a little of the sourness still creeping through. Other fruits could easily be used, such as raspberries, strawberries or blackberries and a little drop of alcohol such as Kahlua or Baileys could even be incorporated into the cream, as well as a little extra sugar, if that takes your fancy.

Recipe : Gooseberry fool

1 punnet of gooseberries, pink or green or both

1/4 - 1/3 cup of sugar, depending on your preference (start with 1/4 cup and increase to 1/3 of a cup if it's not sweet enough for you, or even more if you have a sweet tooth).

2 tbsp water

4 tbsp whipping cream, whipped to soft peaks

2 digestive biscuits, crumbled or smashed in a bag with a rolling pin (optional)

An extra sprinkling of sugar (optional)

Place the gooseberries, sugar and water in a pan over low heat and let the mixture slowly boil down to a mush. It's nice to have a few berries still intact or partly intact to provide some bite. Stir fairly frequently to avoid sticking. (Add more water if it does start to stick).

Remove from the heat, let cool completely and refrigerate for an hour or so to chill.

Place the crumbled digestives (if using) in the bottom of a glass or bowl, top with 1/4 of the gooseberries, then 1/4 of the whipped cream (with some extra sugar if you want, and that little drop of booze) and then another 1/4 of the fruit, finished with another 1/4 dollop of cream to create 4 (or 5) pretty layers.

Repeat with another glass and you have two fools, ready to devour.