Does anyone even need dessert recipes in summer? You just open a tub of ice cream, right?
Yes and no: first of all, homemade ice cream is brilliant, and free from all the stabilisers, emulsifiers and other additives. And you can produce a delightful frozen dessert without an ice cream maker!
Secondly, all the berries that summer brings can be used in many wonderful ways – though I’ll concede they are the most gorgeous eaten on their own.
And however delicious ice cream may be, cake is always welcome. Especially cream filled, super easy to mix summer cake!
Here’s a dozen great summer dessert recipes – homemade ice cream included.
Strawberry fool is the supreme of strawberries and cream, with layers of vanilla scented whipped cream and gorgeous fresh strawberry puree, barely sweetened. A fool if you don’t make it this summer at least once!
A parfait is a layered dessert, usually with ice cream, whipped cream and fruit. My recipe is for a yoghurt parfait and it can double up as an indulgent breakfast. This blueberry parfait is made with lightly roasted blueberries layered with strained Greek yoghurt (labneh), topped with toasted oats and honey.
Athens mess, or Eton mess goes to Greece: fresh blueberries and strawberries, lightly whipped cream and filo pastry brittle instead of meringues. I adore proper Eton mess but this is in a league of its own: the filo brittle is irresistible! You might never want the original version again!
Sheets of puff pastry filled with whipped cream – that’s mille-feuille, ‘a thousand leaves’ which refers to the flaky quality of the pastry. My easy version of the classic French dessert is pistachio mille-feuille made with ready made all-butter puff pastry, whipped cream and sweet pistachio crumbs.
Pistachio and cream mille-feuille
RECIPE
Not quite ice cream and all the better for it: mascarpone sorbet with lemon flavour inspired by a River Café recipe is smooth, creamy and unbelievably refreshing. This is a no-churn recipe: you just need to mash up the freezing sorbet with a fork a few times.
Another ice cream without churning: raspberry ripple ice cream, based on Nigella Lawson’s recipe. It’s stupidly easy, and amazingly effective. Two ingredients plus raspberry puree equals ice cream made in ten minutes.
Raspberry ripple ice cream
RECIPE
All that ice cream can be scooped into homemade cones, made from sweetened, layered filo pastry. Deliciously easy, they can be also filled with cream, mascarpone or custard.
Granita is basically a frozen drink, originally made form a mix of fruit juice and snow! Watermelon granita with no added sugar makes a fantastic dessert when served with a scoop of ice cream. Recipe bonus: instructions how to cube a watermelon.
We call it bramble crumble, you might know it as blackberry crisp. It’s a delicious dessert, put together in minutes, divine with a scoop of ice cream. Brambles, wild blackberries grow everywhere in the UK and in a good summer they are juicy, sweet and free to foragers.
It’s a cake made from peach smoothie! Peach pound cake is the richest, most buttery and tender crumb made with peach puree, with diced fresh peach embedded in the batter.
A spin off Victoria sandwich, this blueberry and cream sponge cake is a magnificent dessert. The sponge batter is the ‘beat all the ingredients together’ type, and it’s filled with lightly roasted blueberries and whipped cream. Gorgeous, easy to make and quite impressive to serve.
Blueberry and cream sponge cake
RECIPE
Raspberry cream roulade, aka Swiss roll or a cream roll, is deliciously light and surprisingly easy to make. Light sponge base is spread with whipped cream and fresh raspberries, then rolled into a log. Just as delicious with strawberries or blueberries.
Raspberry cream roulade
RECIPE