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After our fruit picking this weekend we enjoyed eating Gooseberry fruit fool. It was delicious and incredibly easy to make. I took the gooseberries to my parents’, where we had Sunday lunch, and I cooked the fruit fool for dessert after we’d had dinner.

Ingredients:

1/2lb gooseberries (top and tailed)
3 tbsp caster sugar
1 can or carton of custard (average 425g)

Method:

1. Put gooseberries and sugar in a saucepan under a gentle heat until soft, this should take about 10 minutes.
2. Pour custard in with the fruit and increase the heat, once the mixture is steaming turn off the heat.
3. Use a hand blender to mix fruit and custard together until it is a smooth consistancy.*
4. Taste the mixture and if you find the mixture a little sharp try adding a teaspoon or two of sugar .
5. Serve either hot or cold.

*You can sieve the mixture at this stage if you prefer not to have pips in the dessert.

See this Summer Fruit Fool post for another way to enjoy this dessert.

If you regularly have a dessert here’s a recipe to add to your meal plan. I’ll soon be posting 7 easy desserts on my meal plans 4 u page so you always have something ready after your evening meal.

This Custard Fool recipe is one of my Mum’s. She has made a delicious fruit fool for dessert for many years. You might ask has she been making a fool of herself, but we won’t go there! She always uses custard rather than cream which everybody in our family prefers. It’s nice to be able to use either low fat custard or full fat custard, which is good for young children and their dairy fat intake.

I recently revived my love of this dessert when friends came over to eat and I served a Summer Fruit Fool, now I’ve started making it regularly for my son and he loves it! It seems a good way to get dairy and fruit into his diet. I’m sharing it today because this particularly recipe is quick, easy and counts as one portion of our five a day. The price is low, a carton of custard from Lidl 45p and a packet of frozen fruits £2 from Iceland. It makes small servings for 8/10 or large servings for 4/6 so that works out at around 30p per person!

Ingredients:

1 pack of frozen summer fruits or berries (500g-750g)
1 can or carton of custard (average 425g)

Method:

1. Put frozen fruit in a saucepan under a gentle heat until soft, this should only a few minutes.
2. Pour custard in with the fruit and increase the heat, once the mixture is steaming turn off the heat.
3. Use a hand blender to mix fruit and custard together until it is a smooth consistancy.*
4. Taste the mixture and if you find the mixture a little sharp try adding a teaspoon or two of sugar .
5. Serve either hot or cold.

*You can seive the mixture at this stage if you prefer not to have pips in the dessert.

Ways to vary this recipe:

Use any fruit you like for this recipe. Fresh fruit stewed until soft, canned fruit or any frozen fruit. This is a very versatile dish and you can experiment! My Mum’s favourite is hot apple with some added ground cinnamon served in Autumn when we have lots of apples to use up. Please share your ideas!

Ways to make this simple dessert a dinner party hit:

• Seive the mixture as suggested above to give a refined texture
• Keep back a few whole berries before adding custard to the saucepan, these can be used to decorate when serving
• Serve in individual ramekins with berries, icing sugar and some grated chocolate on the top
• Give each person a piece of shortbread to dip into the fool