Carluccios Raspberry Meringue

Carluccio's is one of my favourite chain restaurants. The decor is beautiful and the food full of fresh italian flavours and lots of mozzarella! I also love the giant pile of raspberry and chocolate meringues they have in their window display, and bought one for dessert!

Here we shared one giant one between myself, my mum and Scott!

Ingredients:

1 large meringue ( or little ones, broken ones, whatever you like!)

red-current jam, or a jam of your choice

Pouring cream

fresh fruit/berries

Method:
Crumble your meringue into three bowls.
Drizzle with the cream. Spoon a few teaspoons of jam into each bowl, and finally sprinkle over a few berries. I used raspberries and blueberries as they were what we had in the fridge! Raspberry's are my favourite fruit so we usually have a punnet of them to hanging round.

The meringues were crisp on the outside and soft and sticky in the middle! Just as they should be. The only problem was they didn't really taste like raspberry which was a little disappointing!

It's sometimes hard to think of desserts to make when you haven't got much in, but anything meringue based is always a winner,  so I always try to keep a packet in the cupboard for when you need that sweet treat :)

Picking berries

The other day I went fruit picking (again) with Scott. Scott's Nana Hazel, was kind enough to let us raid her supply of gooseberries and red currents from her garden. It feels so good being able to pick your own fruit, there is definitely something very caveman like about searching for your own food and then eating it!

We used the gooseberries to make a yummy crumble! And the red-currents we ate straight up, and I used the leftovers to make some other desserts look pretty by laying them over the top!

This is Ollie, Hazel's lovely doggy. He was 'helping' us pick the fruits, and actually had a nibble on a few of the red-currents!

The colour of the gooseberries was so rich compared to the pale green variety you get in the supermarket. They were already nice and sweet so didn't need as much sugar adding to them as the store bought kind do.

I made a gooseberry crumble, and then a few days later used the left over gooseberries with some frozen berries from Lidl and made another one! Crumble is definitely a food obsession at the moment, I just cant get enough of it!