Most of the time, you can serve one of the following without making much effort:
*any fresh fruit, with or without cream, yoghurt, sugar or icecream, meringue nests or chopped meringue, etc. etc. By the way, although it is a good idea to wash fresh fruit, don't wash it until you are ready to prepare/eat it. It keeps better unwashed.
*plain yoghurt with brown sugar. You can add fruit or a fruit sauce (much better than manufactured flavoured varieties). Incidentally, the same thing with added cereal makes a superb breakfast.
*icecream - have a few kinds in the freezer but remember you can add sauces to vanilla - things like coffee extract or caramel syrup or sprinkled drinking chocolate, intended for cooking, make vanilla icecream very luxurious. You can also add things like meringues or brandysnaps, and fresh or frozen fruit. You can even add mixed fruit and peel plus alcohol to make a kind of frozen Christmas pudding which is delicious (I got the idea from an Australian cookbook).
*cheese and biscuits - try to have at least three cheeses, a soft cheese, a hard cheese and a blue cheese. Provide a mixture of biscuits. Most people like water biscuits, oatcakes and crispbreads. My husband will go and find the matzos if I haven’t put them out. Add trimmed celery and/or seedless grapes to the board. Serve cheese on a large board or platter and make sure you put out enough knives for people to cut the cheeses individually. It’s worth buying butter to serve with this - a large pat of butter on a plate looks so much nicer than a tub of spread. And you can use it up in cooking, later.
*pancakes, with lemon juice and sugar (or stuff with icecream and pour sauce/honey over the top). The lack of effort here is due to the fact that my husband is very good at cooking (and tossing) pancakes so I only have to make the mix.
*cooked fruit - try peaches, halved and roasted in a little amaretto plus water and brown sugar, or pears, poached in cheap red wine with a little sugar and some spice (I use Christmas Spice but any combination of cinnamon, nutmeg etc. will do).The pears are fantastic later, chilled, too.
*Fruit salad, served in a cut glass bowl. Don’t add sugar and don’t add lemon juice, whatever the recipe books tell you. Ripe fruit is sweet to begin with, and if you use some citrus fruit or pineapple their juice will stop the other fruit going brown just like lemon would. Try to be imaginative with colour combinations - or go for all pink, all red or all orange. Steer clear of the apple/grape/pear with a cherry so beloved of tired restaurants. That is not a fruit salad. Nor is the peach/pear/cherry canned variety.
Suggestions: 1)water melon, fresh cherries, red grapes and pink grapefruit with crushed raspberries 2)pineapple, tangerine slices (try to remove the skin from each slice), physalis, mango and nectarines with passion fruit pulp 3) white peach, green grapes, melon, banana, sliced kiwi fruit - plus ginger sauce. Don’t be tempted by the more exotic fruits - things like dragon fruits look so gorgeous but unless they’re grown locally they will taste of nothing whatsoever and are very expensive.
In case you want to serve an actual pudding, here are some of our favourites.
Tipsy Hedgehog.
Crush a packet of digestive biscuits - I’m not sure what these are in other countries... and soak in half a bottle of port. You can buy the cheapest port but remember not to put the bottle on the drinks shelf/trolley. Two or three hours later, mould the soggy mess into a rough upturned boat shape on an oval plate. Flatten one end a bit. Cover most of the shape with stiffly whipped cream, leaving swirls and peaks. Leave the flat end free of cream. Scatter grated chocolate (plain for preference). Use chocolate buttons (or the sugar coated variety) as eyes and nostrils at the flattened end. Serve.
Rumtopf
As various summer fruits come into season, prepare and add, with sugar, to strong rum in a large jar. Keep, covered, for a couple of months. Serve with cream or icecream. Don’t keep this too long - it will eventually get too strong or grow mould. Try to consume it all the Christmas after you started it... Or, in the case of Australia, by midwinter.
Summer Pudding
Put a mixture of red fruits into a pan and add a couple of teaspoons of sugar. Heat slowly till the sugar has dissolved and the fruits are creating plenty of juice. You shouldn’t have to add liquid, especially if you use frozen fruits, but if you do, use wine or fruit juice rather than water. Things like blueberries should ‘pop’. While the fruit is quietly exploding, remove the crusts from some sliced white bread - the manufactured ‘Danish’ style works really well for this - and line a deep bowl - not necessarily a big one, just not shallow - using a slotted spoon, transfer the hot fruit to the lined bowl. Boil the remaining juice furiously to reduce it. Pour the juice slowly over the bread edges and use a spoon, gently, to make it flow down the sides. If you can’t be bothered, you will get a marbled pud rather than a uniformly purple one. Your choice. Then add a lid of more crustless slices. and press the lid a bit to get some juice into it. Now cover the bowl with cling film and place a saucer on top of the film. This needs to be small enough to go down into the bowl a bit. Put the heaviest tin/jar in your cupboard on the saucer and leave the whole thing in a cool place for about 18 hours. When you’ve removed the jar, the saucer and film, you can use a spatula or knife blade to loosen the sides of the pud and then put a shallow bowl over the top. Invert the bowls and the pud should slide out into the shallow bowl. Serve with cream, creme fraiche or yoghurt.
N.B. Use the same method to make your own cranberry sauce for Christmas. Much better than those jars you can buy, and you get a lot more...
Flan
Buy a flan base. Yes, I know, but you have to make them in advance and they’re fiddly and you’ll probably end up needing one now rather than in two days’ time. Arrange lots of fruit on the base and add a little alcohol or fruit juice to help moisten the sponge. Then use a packet of quickjel. Well, that’s what we call it here. Use wine or fruit juice instead of water but otherwise follow instructions. Pour the result slowly over the fruit and allow to set - this takes minutes rather than hours. Top with whipped cream. If your local supermarket has run out of prepared flanbases, buy a plain cake (e.g. a ‘madeira’ cake) and slice it to line your chosen serving dish. If, between the fruit and the cream, you intersperse some custard, from a carton if you wish, you will have a trifle. Real trifles don’t have jelly - only the ones that are for children’s parties. If you moisten the sponge with sherry, hey presto, sherry trifle...
Pink
We call this ‘pink’ because my husband developed the recipe in order to have bucketfuls of raspberry mousse instead or those little cartons you can buy. But I have made it with mandarin oranges and orange jelly, whereupon it became ‘orange’ and very nice too, except that it wasn’t raspberry and got a thumbs down. Your choice.
This is a case where tinned fruit actually seems to work better. Drain the fruit and use the juice (I buy fruit in juice rather than syrup) to help make a jelly, using normal jelly squares but making the jelly up to just three quarters of a pint instead of a pint. Refrigerate till it is cold but not set. This drives me insane but my husband is happy to keep checking, because he likes the results. If the jelly is still warm the next stage will curdle. If it has started to set there will be bits of jelly through the eventual mix.
Whisk in a small can of evaporated milk till the mix is about twice its original volume and very bubbly. It’s easiest to use a hand held electric mixer. Add the powder from a packet of what we call Dream Topping and continue to whisk. Fold in the fruit and pour the lot into a pretty bowl. Cut glass is perfect. Chill till the mixture is set and serve with fruit and pouring cream.
Crumble
Crumble is so easy... Just core and chop your chosen fruit. You don't even need to peel it.Apples, pears, plums... Well, you don’t core rhubarb or gooseberries but you know what I mean. Put them in an ovenproof dish. Summer fruits (raspberries etc.) don’t work well (too much juice). Don’t bother peeling the fruit but you could remove the stalks...
Make a crumble mix as follows:
For every 100 grammes of self-raising flour (or flour plus baking powder in whatever proportions you normally use), add 50 grammes of butter or margarine, and mix with a fork, fingers, or a purpose-designed gadget till it all resembles breadcrumbs.
Add 50 grammes of brown sugar, 50 grammes of oatmeal (and some chopped nuts if you feel like it) and stir in.
Cover the fruit with the mix and bake at 6 or 7 for about half an hour.
Serve with custard, cream or icecream.
Fruit pie
Make your normal shortcrust pastry recipe or, if you don’t know how, buy it ready made, fresh or frozen. Put the fruit in a dish, as for crumble, and cover with a pastry lid, with a couple of holes in the top - use a knife or fork - and press the lid down to the edges of the bowl with your fingers. Bake as for crumble. I rarely make pies with pastry bases because they can get very soggy but if you have access to Bramley cooking apples, peel and core them and use them with quite a bit of sugar. Line a pie dish with pastry then add the apple and put a pastry lid on. The same cooking times apply. If you have any leftover pastry, make small individual jam tarts with whatever jam, or marmalade, you have handy. Line small tins with pastry and put a spoonful of jam in each. These will cook faster than pies so check them. Or you can add grated cheese and play about making cheese straws or plaits but really, that’s a bother and if you feel like doing that you probably know how already.
Tarte tatin
The original version :
arrange apple slices in a pretty pattern in a shallow pie dish, pour a little reduced juice (thickened with a small amount of cornflour) over to act as a glaze and cover with a shortcrust pastry lid. Cook as for fruit pies and then put a plate over the tart and invert. You should have a very pretty tart. Some recipes call for sweet pastry but I find I prefer the plain sort.
The pear and ginger version:
When you make the pastry, add some ground ginger. This means making your own pastry. Sorry, folks!
Peel, core and quarter about six pears that are almost ripe but still hard enough to handle. Melt butter and brown sugar in a frying pan and add the pears plus some finely chopped crystallised ginger. Add some alcohol. Brandy is good. But be careful because it might splutter. Arrange the pears in the pie dish or in a shallow springform cake tin. Reduce the liquid in the pan by boiling it till you get fed up. Pour it over the pears.
I have just re-read the recipe, which I originally got from a supermarket magazine. It suggests setting fire to the brandy and letting the flames allow the sauce to thicken. This doesn’t sound like something I would do and I seem to have blanked it out in my memory of the instructions, or replaced it with ‘reduce the liquid’. But feel free!
Top with the ginger pastry lid. Cook as for any pie and invert as for tarte tatin.
Serve with ginger and mascarpone cream. That’s right. More chopped ginger with a little of its syrup plus a tub of mascarpone cheese (a sweet Italian cream cheese)and some more alcohol, beaten/folded into some whipped cream. The quantities are to your taste - experiment.
OK. You now have enough deserts to go with your main courses. And yes, most of them are fruit based. That’s because they taste good and are refreshing after a heavy meal.
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